Amerika

The Left specializes in two things: accepted uber-facts, and talking points.

The former refers to assertions that are claimed to be the consensus of experts, and therefore can be used to justify other assumptions. For example, “race does not exist, because humans are 99% similar in DNA and race-mixing occurs, meaning it’s a social construct.”

Having stated that race does not exist, they can then issue forth a series of talking points, or momentary fascinations for those who lack any inner direction in life: race-mixing is not genocide, demographic displacement is a conspiracy theory, and America is post-racial.

The current point involves President Trump’s tax returns, which were retrieved via subpoena and then leaked (surprise) by Leftists in the courts. No one has been prosecuted, and likely no one will, for this gross invasion of personal privacy and abuse of the legal system.

They are counting on those who receive the talking points, namely people with such little direction that they depend on the news for stimulus, to have zero understanding of life beyond living paycheck to paycheck.

In reality, the wealthy live entirely differently from the wage-slaves.

First, most of their wealth consists of things that they own. Jeff Bezos does not have $200 billion sitting around in a vault. He owns that amount of worth of Amazon stock, and maybe a few houses, cars, and an emergency 401k.

Second, most of them make their money by moving wealth around. That is, they invest it, and in order to keep the taxes low on those investments and make them go farther, they leverage those with massive amounts of debt.

If we eliminated what the Left calls “loopholes” that are in fact deductions, we would create a disincentive to invest, leading to a sluggish economy, almost as bad as when Obama taxes and regulations turned America into a place where the only good jobs were in government.

Third, almost all of them — except the clinically insane — use professionals to file their taxes. This reflects not just a need for legal protection, but the mind-boggling complexity of taxes for people who routinely sell, leverage, and buy properties and investments (shares of businesses).

Finally, they tend to realize very little income directly, mostly because they use their lives as means to that end. It looks like Trump has never worked less than eighty-hour weeks, probably spread over six days or more a week. At that point, your life is the business.

If you want to know what Trump actually has, you have to look at all of his businesses, which is a task too complex for The New York Times. Trump prefers to re-invest money so that it generates more money instead of taking it as income.

The “loopholes” he uses consist of deductions, mostly for investment and losses. These deductions are necessary for business unless you really want people to stop taking risks and making new investments.

Trump took an enormous hit back in the 1980s when he was highly leveraged and the market collapsed. He most likely kept his empires mostly afloat by taking on new forms of debt, and is probably paying those off, in addition to adding new debt in order to keep expanding.

If you think that was bad, consider how many people have been drawing paychecks from Trump businesses during the last thirty years.

We should add here that Trump also gave away his White House salary, and that is a deductible expense. We want to encourage people to give to charity, not penalize it.

If Trump were to do what the Left wants, which is to cut himself a chunk of his net value as a paycheck so that he could pay huge taxes, he would be being taxed twice: once for the companies themselves, and second as someone realizing that income.

Like most smart investors, he takes any income he generates and re-invests it so that it can generate more business, in turn providing opportunity to others.

The buzz over his $750 tax bill is a talking point designed to keep the baristas, call center workers, grocery checkers, non-profit administrative assistants, and welfare dependents of the Left enraged. Most of them receive more in benefits from the government than they pay.

Consider a progressive tax system: the wealthy pay more than the ordinary. This means that instead of a flat tax, where we all pay the same rate, the wealthy subsidize the rest of us. Double-taxing them would simply crush their incentive to generate more wealth that is then taxed.

The Left specializes in crushing wealth because it likes having huge masses of needy people to serve it, with no culture or religion, so that they can be unified into a great mass that centralizes and concretes power, standardizing society so that no one rises above the rest (except the leaders).

They call this dystopian vision “equality.” Anything Trump does to sabotage this serves as a good deed and wise choice to keep his soul free from their disease.

Tags: donald j. trump, taxes