Heywood, I'm gonna take a step back and correct a mistake I made, namely not fact-checking your underlying assumptions in the first place.
You're assuming that all of the losses that Trump wrote off between 1985 and 1994 were the result of simple depreciation. But from all the articles I've seen, the losses weren't all due to that.
This article in particular lists other deductions besides depreciation, including the following paragraph:
fortune.com
If the loss is bigger than the income from the property, “you carry it forward as a net operating loss,” said Francine Lipman, a tax law expert and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas law school. “It’s especially great if you can do it with somebody else’s money.” Someone like a Donald Trump might borrow significant amounts from banks, use their money to buy property, operate the property, deduct the depreciation as well as interest from the mortgage and other expenses, take home a lot of cash, and technically be losing money in their tax filings. Read those words again. "Interest from the mortgage and other expenses." Of course interest shouldn't be all that much, but what falls under "other expenses"? I don't know, but I doubt you do, either. It's up to YOU to prove that those "other expenses" were invalid to begin with. Doesn't seem like the author of the article, nor the experts that the author consulted, raised any eyebrows in this case.
Now it's true that Trump can't continually post paper losses forever, because sooner or later the numbers have to even out. But it seems you can do that for a very long time, and even a span of ten years can't give us the full picture.
Nor can the summaries that the NYTimes obtained, apparently:
However, a summary would not have enough detail to determine what actually happened because of a difference between paper losses and real losses. The first is an accounting acknowledgment of something that technically lowers value but may not mean a cash outlay, versus the second. Mazur told Fortune that “there’s no way to tell” the difference with transcripts, or even filed 1040s. The details are buried in other forms, such as the 8825 or 5498. The bottom line is that there are a TON of complexities that your wild-ass assertions obviously ignore, which makes your entire analysis pretty much unreliable.
Add in the ridiculous assumption that Trump is oh-so-good at hiding things, except from the Great Heywood himself, and I can reasonably call B.S. on your entire argument.
Finally, given that you place your hopes in Maxine Waters, one of the DUMBEST congresswomen ever to serve in the House (next to Alexandria Pelosi-Cortez), I have to seriously question your judgement.
Tenchusatsu |
