Sunday, August 11, 2019

Trump's Portfolio: History of a String of Business Failures Dating Back Decades

This Profiles the Reasons for His Many Failures

Trump has been for most of his life a dismal business failure and that’s is why he does not want the public to see is tax returns. First of all, cite this my personal view for a very long time about him:

Donald J. Trump as President treats the country as a whole like it was a new property acquisition like so many in his failed dismal business past and based on public and court records. Most have been huge failures by any reputable business standard.

From an original story in part here: Many of Donald Trump’s tweets aren’t worth paying attention to, but on Tuesday morning he posted a pair that demanded inspection. Based on Internal Revenue Service transcripts of Trump’s tax returns from 1985 to 1994, the NY Times reportedThey said: “Trump’s core businesses racked up losses of more than a billion dollars in a ten-year period. During 1990 and 1991 alone, Trump’s losses were so large that they “were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the IRS information for those years.”

Trump could simply have ignored the report or dismissed it as old news. But, with cable-news networks (mainly FOX – his go-to network) featuring it prominently, and the Daily News, one of Trump’s home-town papers, running the front-page headline “biggest loser,” he did what he usually does and counterattacked. This is what he wrote on Twitter:

Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases. Much was non-monetary. Sometimes considered “tax shelter” . . . you would get it by building, or even buying. You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes. . . . Almost all real estate developers did - and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport. Additionally, the very old information put out is a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!”

The first thing to note is that despite his parting jibe, he didn’t challenge any of the specific figures in the NY Times story.

They also showed that between 1985 and 1989, a period when the economy was forging ahead and Trump was busy portraying himself as a billionaire with the Midas touch, his core businesses — apartment buildings, hotels, and casinos — somehow managed to lose $359.1 million. That was only the beginning. 

As the economy weakened, in 1990 and 1991, Trump’s core businesses racked up losses of $517.5 million. And, between 1992 and 1994, as the economy recovered, they lost another $286.9 million.

By any standards, this is a lot of money to burn through. But what of Trump’s argument that they weren’t real losses of the sort that deplete your bank account and leave you struggling to make ends meet? 

Were they simply “tax losses —non-monetary deficits” that exploited loopholes in the tax code to minimize Trump’s tax burden?

Continue at the link here at the New Yorker.

Thanks for stopping by.

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