Joe Conason - Trump's Tax Plan: The Grifters Do 'Tax Reform'
April 29, 2017 12:09 am
If you were paying attention to what we learned about Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, then you know that the president of the United States was once the impresario of a student-swindling Trump University, the founder of a Trump Foundation designed for tax evasion and illegal self-dealing, and the chief executive of a Trump Organization that has long relied on various techniques of grifting, from rip-offs of workers and contractors to serial bankruptcies.
And if you know all that, then you cannot be surprised by the way that he and his family have conducted themselves during the first 100 days of his presidency, which is also the way they will behave until they leave or are removed from the White House. They have misused the office of the president to enrich themselves in ways that none of Trump’s predecessors, not even the most venal, could have imagined doing.
Nor can you be surprised that this grasping figure and his appointed cronies, notably Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, have floated a tax “reform” that will enrich the very wealthiest Americans by trillions of dollars, while decimating necessary government functions and depriving millions of working families and the poor of health care. Should this tax plan become law, it would result in thousands of people dying in order to transfer more money to those who already have too much.
While Trump has long refused to abide by the customs and traditions that dictate tax disclosure by presidents and presidential candidates, we know enough about his taxes to see that his new plan, although sorely lacking in detail, will serve his personal interest above all. (No, he didn’t put “America first.”) Although tax policy is often complicated and numbingly dull, the changes that Trump is seeking to benefit himself are really quite simple.
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http://www.nationalmemo.com/trumps-tax-plan-grifters-do-tax-reform/
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