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Biden v Dump 1: If not now, when? If not us, who?

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Wow... This is going to get a lot worse for the entire family

Examining the Trump Organization’s tax records, a curious pattern emerges: Between 2010 and 2018, Mr. Trump wrote off some $26 million in unexplained “consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

In most cases the fees were roughly one-fifth of his income: In Azerbaijan, Mr. Trump collected $5 million on a hotel deal and reported $1.1 million in consulting fees, while in Dubai it was $3 million with a $630,000 fee, and so on.

Mysterious big payments in business deals can raise red flags, particularly in places where bribes or kickbacks to middlemen are routine. But there is no evidence that Mr. Trump, who mostly licenses his name to other people’s projects and is not involved in securing government approvals, has engaged in such practices.

Rather, there appears to be a closer-to-home explanation for at least some of the fees: Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.
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FadeToBlack&Gold said:
Even better - $300+ mil of it is personally guaranteed.

The man never learns. He's a complete imbecile who just happens to have rolled a 20 on his Charisma score.
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Worse than that:

Over the past decade, he appears to have filled the cash-flow gaps with a series of one-shots that may not be available again.

In 2012, ...$100 million mortgage on the commercial space in Trump Tower... [paid] nothing on the principal... $100 million comes due in 2022.

In 2013, he withdrew $95.8 million from his Vornado partnership account.
...
January 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds...$54 million...in 2015, and $68.2 million in 2016. His financial disclosure released in July showed that he had as little as $873,000 in securities left to sell.

Mr. Trump’s businesses reported cash on hand of $34.7 million in 2018, down 40 percent from five years earlier.
...
This time around, he is personally responsible for loans and other debts totaling $421 million, with most of it coming due within four years. Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president.
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This gem too:

The dispute may center on a single claim that jumps off the page of Mr. Trump’s 2009 tax return: a declaration of more than $700 million in business losses that he had not been allowed to use in prior years. Unleashing that giant tax-avoidance coupon enabled him to receive some or all of his refund.

The material obtained by The Times does not identify the business or businesses that generated those losses. But the losses were a kind that can be claimed only when partners give up their interest in a business. And in 2009, Mr. Trump parted ways with a giant money loser: his long-failing Atlantic City casinos.

After Mr. Trump’s bondholders rebuffed his offer to buy them out, and with a third round of bankruptcy only a week away, Mr. Trump announced in February 2009 that he was quitting the board of directors.

“If I’m not going to run it, I don’t want to be involved in it,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m one of the largest developers in the world. I have a lot of cash and plenty of places I can go.”

The same day, he notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that he had “determined that his partnership interests are worthless and lack potential to regain value” and was “hereby abandoning” his stake.

The language was crucial. Mr. Trump was using the precise wording of I.R.S. rules governing the most beneficial, and perhaps aggressive, method for business owners to avoid taxes when separating from a business.

A partner who walks away from a business with nothing — what tax laws refer to as abandonment — can suddenly declare all the losses on the business that could not be used in prior years. But there are a few catches, including this: Abandonment is essentially an all-or-nothing proposition. If the I.R.S. learns that the owner received anything of value, the allowable losses are reduced to just $3,000 a year.

And Mr. Trump does appear to have received something. When the casino bankruptcy concluded, he got 5 percent of the stock in the new company. The materials reviewed by The Times do not make clear whether Mr. Trump’s refund application reflected his public declaration of abandonment. If it did, that 5 percent could place his entire refund in question.

If the auditors ultimately disallow Mr. Trump’s $72.9 million federal refund, he will be forced to return that money with interest, and possibly penalties, a total that could exceed $100 million. He could also be ordered to return the state and local refunds based on the same claims.
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French Rage said:
This gem too:

A partner who walks away from a business with nothing — what tax laws refer to as abandonment — can suddenly declare all the losses on the business that could not be used in prior years. But there are a few catches, including this: Abandonment is essentially an all-or-nothing proposition. If the I.R.S. learns that the owner received anything of value, the allowable losses are reduced to just $3,000 a year.

And Mr. Trump does appear to have received something. When the casino bankruptcy concluded, he got 5 percent of the stock in the new company. The materials reviewed by The Times do not make clear whether Mr. Trump’s refund application reflected his public declaration of abandonment. If it did, that 5 percent could place his entire refund in question.

If the auditors ultimately disallow Mr. Trump’s $72.9 million federal refund, he will be forced to return that money with interest, and possibly penalties, a total that could exceed $100 million. He could also be ordered to return the state and local refunds based on the same claims.
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Another fantastic piece of creative writing from the Times. Not the least bit speculative, no sir.

We've seen this movie before. Hot out of the box ... then pfffffttttt at the end ...
 
French Rage said:
This gem too:
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Somehow I didn't quite grasp the magnitude. He took $700 million in losses and used that to basically pay no taxes. We knew that already I believe from the 2019 reporting by the Times.

The part I'm confused about is, wouldn't he owe more than $73 million because all of that $700 million in losses would be effectively disqualified and would be able to offset income? Or was the $73 million refund part of the Obama-era law that allowed past losses to be carried to past returns?

Edit: Ok, so yeah, that $73 million was a refund for half of the $1.4 billion he claimed in losses. What's insane is that would mean the effective rate on that income offset was still only about 10%. Not that this is news that the rich don't pay taxes, but it just boils my fucking blood that I pay a higher effective rate than that.

This whole thing is going to be very confusing for the average idiot. The messaging here needs to be laser-focused on:
A) He pays less in taxes than the average family who makes $XX,XXX
B) He's a bankrupt fraud
C) He owes $421 million by the end of his next potential term
 
Wayuphere said:
Getting desperate, are we? Nice try, but still wrong. The polls had Clinton up by 3% before the election. She ended up by 2%.
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In separate but equally irrelevant news, Tampa Bay outshot Dallas 41-33 in last night's SCF game.

I didn't see the Stanley Cup leaving the arena with the Bolts last night ...
 
Dr. Mrs. & I got our mail-in ballots this weekend and have filled them out. We are dropping them off in a collection box tomorrow.

No USPS for us for as long as the Nazis are in control.

VA has an excellent system with tracking. I'm pretty sure I know how people f-cked up their ballots, too. You fill in your ballot and seal it in an internal envelope. Then you put any ID you might need in an external envelope and certify who you are and have a witness signature. I'm sure some people either put everything in the internal envelope or left the ballot in the external envelope. The former would be a PITA. The latter would be problematic since it would break the security chain of the ballot.

Assuming morons break down evenly between parties (spoiler: they don't, since the parties now bifurcate as stupid whites vs everyone else, and as there are still more whites in America than POC there are more stupid whites than stupid POC), it is probably a wash. I'm sure the Nazis are working on how to intercept and change ballots, but they would have to break the seal to do so on either the inner or outer envelope.
 
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Wayuphere said:
Getting desperate, are we? Nice try, but still wrong. The polls had Clinton up by 3% before the election. She ended up by 2%.
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We have a nice advantage in the Right being innumerate. It's clear they don't understand any statistics beyond rudimentary probability and some jock business stuff. They literally do not get how sampling works or how to evaluate polling. Now obviously their polling firms understand it to some extent, but even there the obvious methodological fallacies employed by Rasmussen demonstrate that either they are dumb too (unlikely) or they are relying on the idiocy of their conservative clientele to spoon feed them what they want to hear, thus ensuring continuing business (a near certainty).

The same intellectual deficiencies that lead to conservatism also either cause or at least correlate with an incapacity to critically analyze data. If you're so dumb you don't understand climate, evolution, or epidemiology, you are also gonna be too dumb to understand statistics.
 
It's all speculative guys. That's why the IRS has had an audit going on it for an entire decade. It all makes perfect sense when you think of it that way.
 
rufus said:
You claimed the polls were wrong. The polls were not wrong, they were well within the margin of error.
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No dumb-ar$e. Actually I suggested the polls were irrelevant. Big difference.

"The polling stuff is brilliant, guys - keep it up. It worked SO well back in 2016, after all."

But BTW if polling is intended to predict a winner, then it was indeed wrong as well.

Now I remember why I reflexively bypass the blithering drivel you routinely scrawl out ...
 
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