5 tips from Donald Trump on how to profit at the expense of the American middle class
May 24, 2016 by Elizabeth Chan
Make a quick buck—no matter the cost for anyone else.
Donald Trump has been in business for decades—and he’s made money doing what he does best: promoting himself and his business interests at the expense of everyone else.
Here are five things you can learn from Trump’s experiences about how to make money off the backs of the American middle class:
Five million Americans lost their homes when the housing market collapsed in 2008, and 9 million Americans lost their jobs in the recession that followed. Millions more saw their retirement funds and savings wiped out.
But Trump wasn’t thinking about any of that back in 2006. When asked about a potential housing crash, Trump said, “I sort of hope that happens.” Why? So he could swoop in and “make a lot of money”—because if people lost their homes, businesses, or property, “people like me would go in and buy like crazy.”
When a special government fund was set up to help small businesses in New York recover from the terrorist attacks of September 11, Trump saw an opportunity.
He snatched up over a hundred thousand taxpayer dollars for one of his swanky properties on Wall Street—not exactly a small business. Trump’s greed took advantage of funding aimed at keeping small businesses open in Lower Manhattan in the wake of the attack.
On the campaign trail, Trump calls out companies like United Technologies, Ford Motor Company, and Mondalez International for shipping American jobs overseas. But behind closed doors, he’s also investing in them. Trump has made a pretty penny off outsourcers—including as much as $75,000 from bonds issued by those three companies since January of last year.
In 1981, Trump had to provide the New Jersey Casino Control Commission with five years of tax returns to file a casino application. From a report released after his application was processed, we know that Trump—a millionaire then and now—paid zero federal income taxes for two years in the late 1970s by reporting negative income and losses. Now that he’s running for president, Trump refuses to release his tax returns to the voters (as every presidential nominee has done since 1976), but it’s likely that he’s hiding the fact that he doesn’t pay his fair share in taxes.
Trump owns a 147-acre luxury golf course in Westchester County, New York—and claims on his financial disclosure that it’s worth at least $50 million. He’s pleased to brag about that fact publicly, but when it comes to his taxes, his lawyers have argued that the course is worth a fraction of that figure: $1.35 million. That claim would cut his tax burden on the property by 90 percent—and dump it on all the other taxpayers in town.
That’s the Trump way. |
