Evidently some people need to learn the fucking difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.
Dogs Bite Men and Trumps Duck Taxes
Nobody hands over 55% of his life’s work to the IRS. The real revelation is dad’s role in the Trump myth.
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By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Oct. 5, 2018 6:54 p.m. ET
If you are the last and perhaps only person in America to believe Donald Trump built his business empire without help from his father, the New York Times has a 14,000-word investigation to disabuse you.
If you thought his genius was for anything other than image management, the piece will doubly help you get up to speed.
Unfortunately, the most interesting revelation is one the Times buries—the astonishing degree to which father Fred Trump patiently financed and strategically connived in the creation of what the paper calls the “Donald Trump myth.”
Think Joseph P. Kennedy. There’s even a parallel in the displacement of firstborn son Fred Jr. from his original slot as heir apparent.
In one way excruciatingly detailed by the Times, however, Mr. Trump and his sire are nothing new under the sun. Nobody in their right mind from the compulsive accumulator class pays the punitive federal estate tax. From an early age, such people make sure their lifetime achievements are not sucked up and splattered away in 15 seconds of federal spending.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all apparently in the pink of health, have been working for years to shield their assets from the taxman. Sam Walton, the saintly founder of Walmart, in his autobiography advised: “The best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.”
Because politicians find it useful to appease both the envious and the wealthy, the IRS code features both an estate tax and ways to avoid it.
A loophole the Times accuses the Trumps of using is a so-called grantor-retained annuity trust, described as “one of the tax code’s great gifts to the ultrawealthy.” Unsurprisingly, it
also happens to be a favorite of the Sulzberger family, which owns the New York Times.
Show me a wealthy entrepreneur whose family paid the death tax of 55% (now 40%) and I will show you an entrepreneur who died unexpectedly. Or who, like Miami Dolphins owner Joe Robbie, watched from beyond the grave as his careful arrangements were upended by his squabbling heirs.
The Times now finds illegal many Trump Senior dodges that in the 1990s passed IRS muster or escaped IRS notice and have been effectively rendered legal (at least for criminal purposes) by the statute of limitations. Notable is a stratagem known to the corrupt as well as those fleeing corruption since the dawn of time: over-invoicing. Father Trump created for his children a company to manage his properties and then allowed it to overbill him (and his tenants) for a variety of services and improvements.
We should always applaud journalistic enterprise even if the Times devotes considerable resources to a tax story that will surprise exactly no one. More interesting in their way are questions like who dumped a decade’s worth of private Trump tax documents in the paper’s lap and
why doesn’t the Times devote similar energy to finding out what’s in the secret appendix of the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the strange doings of James Comey in the 2016 race? The press continues to treat Mr. Trump’s election as a terrible accident that never should have been allowed to happen, yet blinds itself to the most interesting part of the story.
Also, let’s note an important underpinning of many such newspaper investigations. Journalists are as unlikely as the next person to adhere rigidly to the law in their driving habits, their use of pharmaceuticals, their failure to procure a valid fishing license.
But as a class they do insist on rigid adherence to the law on the part of their subjects for the purpose of writing gotcha exposés. And Mr. Trump is a potential gold mine in this regard twice over, being the most intriguing person on the planet right now and trailing a 40-year history of high-wire personal and business laxity.
Yet the Times also is confused if it believes its tax investigation will finally discredit Mr. Trump once and for all in the eyes of his supporters.
The people whose class envy and resentment extends to a desire to despoil the rich at death are not Trump voters but the New York Times’s own upper-middle-class readership. The federal estate tax exemption has been lifted to today’s $11.2 million from $5 million precisely to accommodate these people’s desire to pass along their own justly earned, entirely deserved nest eggs. Meanwhile, anybody who has more to leave is obviously a greedy so-and-so.
This is not the place to debate the merits of an estate tax. Wikipedia has a rundown of ingenious pro-tax arguments by recognized academic experts such as the University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod. But notice that today’s scourge of all things supply-side, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, was once a critic of inheritance taxes on grounds that they are anti-growth and tend to increase inequality.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dogs-bi...xes-1538780049
Trump is a tax cheat. And a lying
