PERRspectives: Trump's Self-Dealing Scam to Raid the U.S. Treasury
"David Farenthold of the Washington Post on Tuesday broke a huge story about the rampant wrong-doing at the Trump Foundation. Donald Trump, Farenthold revealed, "spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire's for-profit businesses." But if the Republican nominee's "self-dealing" as president of the Trump Foundation likely violated the law, the real estate magnate is trying to perpetrate a much larger scam to enrich himself at the expense of American taxpayers. And this other Trump con, a trillion-dollar shell game with the U.S. tax code, is completely legal. Here's how the scheme works. Last week, Donald Trump unveiled the third version of his tax plan in under a year and the second in just the last six weeks. The biggest change from August was the decision to seemingly abandon his proposed 15 percent corporate tax rate for "partnerships, limited liability companies and other businesses known as pass-throughs." But as the New York Times documented on September 16, that announcement represented "Conflicting Policy From Trump: To Keep, and Remove, Tax Cut." A few hours after Donald J. Trump publicly backed away from a $1 trillion tax cut for small businesses, campaign aides on Thursday privately assured a leading small-business group that Mr. Trump in fact remained committed to the proposal -- winning the group's endorsement. The campaign then told the Tax Foundation, a conservative-leaning Washington think tank it asked to price the plan, that Mr. Trump had indeed decided to eliminate the tax cut. Call it the trillion-dollar lie: Both assertions cannot be true. But Trump's misdirection wouldn't just cost the United States Treasury an estimated $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Keeping that pass-through payday for plutocrats would also redirect millions of dollars from Uncle Sam to Donald J. Trump and family--every year."
