The Trump family's massive grift: Who cares about policy? As a business and branding venture...

[DonViejo]

The Trump family’s massive grift: Who cares about policy? As a business and branding venture, this presidency is going swell

Legislative accomplishments? Zilch. But in terms of building the family fortune for the future, it's all going well

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

In an apparent attempt to fool people into thinking his first 100 days have been wildly successful, President Donald Trump is engaging in a flurry of activity this week. Evidently he hopes that will serve as a proxy for accomplishment. He’s started a trade war with Canada, chatted up astronauts and talked about sending Americans to Mars, signaled that he plans to withdraw from NAFTA and then changed his mind in the same afternoon, offered up some talking points that he called a tax plan, piled the entire U.S. Senate into buses and summoned them to the White House for a briefing on North Korea (later described by one senator as “a dog and pony show”) and jump started the doomed Obamacare repeal zombie. And in the middle of all this he weirdly punted on his biggest campaign promise, the “big, beautiful wall.” Trump may not have been productive, but he’s been busy.

The tax proposal is the most interesting because it’s a revealing illustration of Trump’s self-serving White House grift, which carries on regardless of anything else that’s happening in this administration. It’s basically a blueprint for massive profits for himself and his children. Naturally enough, Trump has proposed eliminate the estate tax because it’s so unfair that Ivanka and the boys should have to pay taxes on their immense windfall when their daddy passes on. But that’s just the beginning, as the New York Times reported:

Beyond cutting the tax rate to 15 percent for large corporations, which now pay a rate of 35 percent, Mr. Trump also wants that rate for a broad range of firms known as pass-through entities — including hedge funds, real estate concerns like Mr. Trump’s and large partnerships — that currently pay taxes at individual rates, which top off at 39.6 percent

After presenting this wish list to the press, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin declared that Trump had no plans to ever release his tax returns, because he has been more transparent than any president before him. So they will not be voluntarily produced, period. Mnuchin also acknowledged that a scheme such as the one they are proposing for pass-through companies like Trump’s could potentially be used as a tax shelter, but assured everyone that it would not be used as a loophole, whatever that means.


more
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/27/the-trump-familys-massive-grift-who-cares-about-policy-as-a-business-and-branding-venture-this-presidency-is-going-swell/

[katmondoo]

1. It is just as much work to scheme as to do honest productive work

He could have a heart attack just keeping tract of all his talking points

[dalton99a]

2. Kick.