Jump to content

US Politics: Ruthless Aggression


DMC

Recommended Posts

30 minutes ago, Kalibear said:

The response to this should not be how little he paid. The thing that should constantly be spread is how pathetically bad his business acumen has been, how he did not make any money for 10 years, and what a pathetic loser he is. 

It's this.  Be amazed that people who you respected for their "investment and business acumen" are going along with this huckster.  It's a fun conversation/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I doubt it will change too many minds, but hopefully it will dominate the news cycle for 1 week and have Donnie playing defense.

I doubt it will change one mind. Leveraging losses to avoid paying taxes doesn't change much, and the fact that he had so many losses to leverage goes into his lack of business acumen, which has already been covered to no real negative effect. 

Now, he's personally guaranteed loans on his hotel and his golf resort, which are struggling and will continue to struggle due to COVID. This is close to half a billion dollar incentive to get the economy reopened despite the risk to lives. That's the thing that actually gets me.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

I laughed

 

 

My word, Donald quoting a Breitbart tweet referencing a Project Veritas investigation. That has to be some kind of triple scoop of bullshit.

But, lies and misinformation have won elections before. Mockery I guess is the only real way to respond publicly, but if there aren't any behind the scenes strategies to conduct anti-dis-information campaigns it still leaves open the possibility of these nonsense allegations influencing enough voters to make a difference.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You know I like to report what CNBC is showing in the early hours of the morning. This morning there was a discussion about health care company stocks and the Democrats saying that putting Barrett on the Supreme Court will be the end of Obama Care. The new narrative seems to be ‘there’s only a 20% chance that happens, Roberts and Kavanaugh will vote against it’.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, S John said:

Yea my parents basically applauded him on having good tax attorneys. I don’t get it. I often don’t attempt to drive my point home with them but I did this time. He is a billionaire. Each one of us (within the conversation of which my brother in law, sister, and wife were also in) pay more money INDIVIDUALLY than our billionaire - born into wealth and never wanted for a single damn thing - President of the United States - who, again, pays little to no actual taxes in the United States.

Pretty quickly got to the point where they say they are just so sick of politics. Which I’ve learned to mean, we cannot refute any of the things you have said but we are going to vote for Trump anyway. I honestly just kind of laugh about it at this point because we all live in the same state and myself, my wife, sister, and brother-in-law are gonna cancel their presidential votes 4-2, which is how I like to think about it in their particular case.

It's pretty simple, people don't like to admit when they're wrong, and in this case they were catastrophically wrong, and they really don't want to admit that liberals were right the entire time. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you read the entire NYT story, the takeaway shouldn't be that he is really shitty at business, or that he has great tax lawyers - it's that at the very least he's spent since 1995 breaking every tax law in the books, and that if any one of us who did just one of the things he's been shown to have done, we'd be prosecuted for fraud in a hot minute.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, The Great Unwashed said:

If you read the entire NYT story, the takeaway shouldn't be that he is really shitty at business, or that he has great tax lawyers - it's that at the very least he's spent since 1995 breaking every tax law in the books, and that if any one of us who did just one of the things he's been shown to have done, we'd be prosecuted for fraud in a hot minute.

Another fascinating thing I heard this morning is that Trump sold his entire stock portfolio between 2014 and 2016, so for someone who constantly harps on the stock market going up, he actually had no faith that markets would rise or that the economy would improve during his presidency. 
 

It does explain why he was always demanding that hedge fund managers and other financial market people be forced to pay more taxes, even while he wasn’t paying any.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Another fascinating thing I heard this morning is that Trump sold his entire stock portfolio between 2014 and 2016, so for someone who constantly harps on the stock market going up, he actually had no faith that markets would rise or that the economy would improve during his presidency. 
 

It does explain why he was always demanding that hedge fund managers and other financial market people be forced to pay more taxes, even while he wasn’t paying any.

At some point, don't the billionaires backing Trump asking themselves whether it's in their best interests to continue to do so, considering just how much fucking attention among the hoi polloi he draws to exactly how they carry out their bullshit tax dodging among?

If the unwashed masses figure out that billionaires are buying up $21 million estates and using them as charitable contribution tax write-offs via conservation easement deductions, well, those smelly ingrates might start to figure out the whole thing is a scam.

Sorry, but fuck Republicans AND Democrats on this one. Trump is only a symptom of the disease. Make no mistake - this shit is a feature, not a bug.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Damn it, my phone won’t let me actually have enough space for a reply, but here it is -

That is FRAUD. That is not a “feature” of our tax system.

I would support a full audit into the conservation easement deduction for every entity claiming it to see whether it is being used as intended for the most part. I'd argue the fraud was built in - just make sure you can hire tax lawyers to not get caught.

Considering that a deduction was created exclusively for the wealthy, combined with gutted IRS funding for decades, I'd say it's working as intended.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Also, it seems that in addition to his outright fraud previously mentioned, most of his “business” expenses are really personal expenses, and the IRS needs to get after him, and for more than just the ongoing refund investigation.

Not to mention Donnie Jr., Ivanka, and Eric. 

If it looks like Trump might lose the election, Democrats might think about surreptitiously offering Trump a deal - leave quietly, pardon yourself and the kids, and get the fuck out.

If Democrats win the Senate and presidency, the Trump kids will go away for good. I don't know what the consensus is on the politics of prosecuting a former president, but I'm always going to advocate for the route of making a public spectacle, preferably guillotines.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

There is something going on in Ohio, it appears as if Biden has a modest lead there currently. Of course, some of this is driven by the Fox News poll putting Biden +5 there, but Trump's chances have eroded since early September, and its now a toss up. The Goodyear nonsense cant have helped.

According to Dave Wasserman, Biden is ahead of Clinton with White noncollege voters everywhere, but how much depends on the region.  In the South, it's small (which explains why Biden isn't doing better in FL), but in the midwest, it has been as much as ten points.  Hence Biden polling tied/ahead in Ohio and Iowa, states that Trump won by 8 and 9 points respectively. 

It's looking like all the states we're going to have good information on election night are going to be the "Biden is putting this thing away" kinda states.  Georgia, Florida, and Texas should all have all the votes counted by midnight.  North Carolina and Ohio will have a small number still outstanding, but we'll know probably 95% or so of the vote.  If Biden wins even one of those, he's in good shape to hit 270 (or he would be in a normal election where we don't have to worry about not counting all the votes or coups or anything). 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

It is totally not being used as intended. Don Jr’s public statement and the Trump Organization materials make that very clear.

Its a personal residence.

Accountants and tax attorneys (full disclosure: I am a CPA and am friends with a tax partner at a large white-shoe law firm) cannot just wave a magic wand and get people out of a tax obligation. His tax attorney (because it is probably a sole proprietor) should be disbarred if he gave advice that this was legal, and the partners in the accounting firm should lose their licenses.

Who the fu— has ever heard of Mazars, anyways? (the accounting firm he uses). “Billionaires” generally use the Big 4 accounting firms.

No, I understand - I used to work for a (small) CPA firm so I know you're always just going on what your client tells you and not everything has to be itemized - but I'd argue that's the "working as intended" part. Making fraud more difficult to find could be a reason in itself.

I'm not meaning to paint CPAs and tax lawyers with a broad brush; just that Trump got an unscrupulous tax lawyer somewhere to figure this out for him, a tax lawyer who is probably in high demand among Trump's ilk.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, Maithanet said:

According to Dave Wasserman, Biden is ahead of Clinton with White noncollege voters everywhere, but how much depends on the region.  In the South, it's small (which explains why Biden isn't doing better in FL), but in the midwest, it has been as much as ten points.  Hence Biden polling tied/ahead in Ohio and Iowa, states that Trump won by 8 and 9 points respectively. 

It's looking like all the states we're going to have good information on election night are going to be the "Biden is putting this thing away" kinda states.  Georgia, Florida, and Texas should all have all the votes counted by midnight.  North Carolina and Ohio will have a small number still outstanding, but we'll know probably 95% or so of the vote.  If Biden wins even one of those, he's in good shape to hit 270 (or he would be in a normal election where we don't have to worry about not counting all the votes or coups or anything). 

Right, its the subtle differences between say Michigan and Ohio that are interesting even within the midwest. I'd suggest Ohio was hit harder by the events of the past 20 odd years, but I dont know for sure.

Even if Biden isnt declared winner in NC, we should be able to tell if Cunningham is well ahead. That would be some solace if the election cant be called on election night.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

I doubt his attorney has anyone but Trump as a client, or has a very small client base.

There’s a difference between “grey area” (was that three-martini lunch really strictly a business lunch) and outright fraud.

The only difference is what the rich get away with. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...