“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get — I’m so greedy,” Donald Trump told Republican primary voters last January. “But now I want to be greedy for the United States.”
In a country so besotted with wealth and power that a real-estate scion serially firing his less well-born subordinates made for must-see television, this proved to be a winning pitch. With a single sentence, Trump rebranded his long history of ripping off contractors, investors, indebted single parents, and his own severely ill family members into a testament to his own ruthless efficacy. He pursued his own prosperity by any means necessary. Now, he’d do the same for his country. The line’s audacity gave it a ring of authenticity. It was simple, memorable, surprising — and, of course, exactly what a presidential candidate who was still “greedy, greedy, greedy” for himself would say.
Since Trump took office, he has provided countless demonstrations of the insatiable avarice he proudly advertised. The president has shamelessly refused to put any meaningful distance between himself and his globe-spanning business interests, while directing millions of public dollars into the coffers of his own properties, and using his bully pulpit to promote his daughter’s fashion line.
But all that tasteless, unprecedented, norm-shattering stuff is small potatoes. For Donald Trump, the real payday lies in simply passing a personally tailored version of the Republican Party’s regressive agenda.
On Wednesday, the president unveiled his plan for “reforming” the corporate tax code. And the cornerstone of that proposal is a giant tax cut for corporations — and an even bigger one for businesses like his own.
The Trump Organization, like many real-estate concerns, isn’t structured as a “C corporation,” but as a collection of “pass-through” enterprises — businesses that pass their income and deductions through to their owners’ individual returns. Thus, at present, Trump almost certainly pays the 39.6 percent top marginal rate on his earnings.
His tax plan would cut the rate for all businesses — corporations and pass-throughs alike — down to 15 percent. Currently, the top rate for corporations is 35 percent (although barely any of them actually pay that much). This would immediately blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole into the deficit — before kicking off a wave of tax avoidance that’d widen that hole into a chasm.
It would also, almost certainly, save Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars.
Granted, Trump would be far from the only beneficiary of a giant cut on pass-through entities. Most businesses in the U.S. are structured as pass-throughs, including many of the mom-and-pop small businesses that are valorized in virtually every speech uttered by American politicians. Right now, the discrepancy between the top corporate rate and the pass-through one is (statutorily) a mere 4.6 percent. If Trump slashed the corporate rate down to 15 — while giving nothing to pass-throughs — the latter would raise hell on Capitol Hill. And they’d be able to lace their demand for a tax cut of their own with populist rhetoric about Washington favoring big businesses over small ones. And such complaints wouldn’t be entirely mendacious!
But they’d still be mostly so: More than two-thirds of the income at pass-through companies accrues to the top one percent of earners. Seated beside those sacred mom-and-pops at the pass-through table is virtually every hedge fund in the United States (apparently, those guys are no longer “getting away with murder”). What’s more, most small businesses don’t generate enough income to benefit from Trump’s cut, anyway.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...opose-giant-unfunded-tax-cut-for-himself.html
In a country so besotted with wealth and power that a real-estate scion serially firing his less well-born subordinates made for must-see television, this proved to be a winning pitch. With a single sentence, Trump rebranded his long history of ripping off contractors, investors, indebted single parents, and his own severely ill family members into a testament to his own ruthless efficacy. He pursued his own prosperity by any means necessary. Now, he’d do the same for his country. The line’s audacity gave it a ring of authenticity. It was simple, memorable, surprising — and, of course, exactly what a presidential candidate who was still “greedy, greedy, greedy” for himself would say.
Since Trump took office, he has provided countless demonstrations of the insatiable avarice he proudly advertised. The president has shamelessly refused to put any meaningful distance between himself and his globe-spanning business interests, while directing millions of public dollars into the coffers of his own properties, and using his bully pulpit to promote his daughter’s fashion line.
But all that tasteless, unprecedented, norm-shattering stuff is small potatoes. For Donald Trump, the real payday lies in simply passing a personally tailored version of the Republican Party’s regressive agenda.
On Wednesday, the president unveiled his plan for “reforming” the corporate tax code. And the cornerstone of that proposal is a giant tax cut for corporations — and an even bigger one for businesses like his own.
The Trump Organization, like many real-estate concerns, isn’t structured as a “C corporation,” but as a collection of “pass-through” enterprises — businesses that pass their income and deductions through to their owners’ individual returns. Thus, at present, Trump almost certainly pays the 39.6 percent top marginal rate on his earnings.
His tax plan would cut the rate for all businesses — corporations and pass-throughs alike — down to 15 percent. Currently, the top rate for corporations is 35 percent (although barely any of them actually pay that much). This would immediately blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole into the deficit — before kicking off a wave of tax avoidance that’d widen that hole into a chasm.
It would also, almost certainly, save Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars.
Granted, Trump would be far from the only beneficiary of a giant cut on pass-through entities. Most businesses in the U.S. are structured as pass-throughs, including many of the mom-and-pop small businesses that are valorized in virtually every speech uttered by American politicians. Right now, the discrepancy between the top corporate rate and the pass-through one is (statutorily) a mere 4.6 percent. If Trump slashed the corporate rate down to 15 — while giving nothing to pass-throughs — the latter would raise hell on Capitol Hill. And they’d be able to lace their demand for a tax cut of their own with populist rhetoric about Washington favoring big businesses over small ones. And such complaints wouldn’t be entirely mendacious!
But they’d still be mostly so: More than two-thirds of the income at pass-through companies accrues to the top one percent of earners. Seated beside those sacred mom-and-pops at the pass-through table is virtually every hedge fund in the United States (apparently, those guys are no longer “getting away with murder”). What’s more, most small businesses don’t generate enough income to benefit from Trump’s cut, anyway.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...opose-giant-unfunded-tax-cut-for-himself.html