Week of 05/01/2017

Trump-Tax Will Be Another Failed Trump Brand
– by David Matthews 2

So the populist narcissist, the orange-skinned-wacky-man of Washington-by-way-of-NYC, President Donald Trump thinks that healthcare is “too complicated” and that supposedly “surprised” him.  After all, he claimed on the campaign trail numerous times that it would be “so easy, so easy,” that he could do it on day one of his presidency.

There’s a lot that he supposedly thinks is “too hard” that he previously claimed he could resolve quickly.  China, North Korea, fixing the economy, getting a one-party Congress to work with him, getting people to stop saying bad things about him...

Oh, wait, he didn’t promise those last two things would be easy; he just assumed they would be.

People need to understand that President Trump is a narcissist, and that narcissists are “big vision” people.  They don’t work the details.  They really don’t know the details.  They just deal with and sell ideas.

Think about all the con artists seen in CNBC’s series “American Greed”, or, for that matter, any program that focuses on con artists and get-rich-quick salesmen and Ponzi scheme managers.  They all talk the same talk as Trump.  They all deal with big dreams and unbelievable goals.  They tell you to not worry about details; that things will just work, and they will be so successful that you will kick yourself for having any kind of doubts.

I mention this because Trumpaconallus decided that, since the previously “easy” healthcare reform is now so “complicated”, he would turn his attention to something else that could be “easy”… tax reform.

And just in time to claim that he “did something” for his first 100 days, his people presented the Trump-Tax (trademark probably pending)!

The Trump-Tax would supposedly cut down the tax rate from five tiers to three, slash the corporate tax from 35% to 15%, eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax and the Estate Tax altogether and get rid of quite a few tax deductions including the amount paid for state and local taxes.  But, hey, it would also double the standard tax deduction most of us get.  So that’s a plus, right?  More money for us and a lot more for Big Corporate.

“So easy… so simple…”

Of course this is just a “rough cut”, because he can’t really enact taxes.  That’s not his job.  Check the Constitution if you don’t believe me.  But he supposedly has a “crack team” of “go-getting” rubber-stamping legislators under his belt that will personally see to it that his will be done.  After all, they did just a smash-up job enacting Trumpcare, right?  Right?  Winning!

Oh, and I was just handed a memo from the White House, obliging me to remind people that Donald Trump won the 2016 Farce and that supposedly nobody thought that he would win and it is supposedly “impossible” for a member of the GOP to win the election.  So, not only is that “winning”, but “bi-winning”!  Go ahead and pop a Tic-Tac, Mr. President, because you know you’re gonna get some from all of that “winning”.

Now I can sit here and give you numbers and tell you that the Trump-Tax will do absolutely nothing to fund all of the essential services of the federal government, including Trump’s lengthy list of wars that we are having to fight in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, and the New York Times, and not to mention Trump’s signature Trump Wall (trademark probably pending) at the Mexican border, and the security needed to protect his wife and son at Trump Tower and also his forever-weekend home in Mar-A-Largo.  Oh, yeah, the Trump Wall... Mexico was supposed to pay for that, remember?  Well, guess what, America?  We got Trumped on that!  We’re footing the bill and hoping that President “Winning” is somehow able to get Mexico to compensate us for it.  So we have to factor that in as well. 

Oh, and did I mention that Trump wants to put a man on Mars before he leaves office?  Yeah, we’d have to find a way to fund that as well.

But Trump is not about the details.  That’s not how he rolls.  He’s the ideas person.  He has his elite crew of millionaires and billionaires to come up with that stuff so he can shove it all over to his “aggressive go-getting” rubber-stampers in Congress so they can find a way to make it all work.

And his audience?  The people that he’s pandering to?  You know… you?  Those of you who voted for him?  He’s got your number. You’re idiots!  Each and every one of you who voted for him are idiots, and he knows that!  He knows that you don’t care about numbers and details.  He just wants you to believe that you’ll be paying “less” in taxes, that you’ll be getting “more” money, and all of the pesky little details can be taken up by accountants and tax preparers and those financial programs sold by Intuit.

Now… remember the investment schemers?  The cold-calling pump-and-dump con artists?  They manage to succeed because they know that the people they fleece don’t care about details.  They know that the people they fleece are idiots; every last one of them.  Sure many of those victims are successful.  Doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, but they don’t know squat about money and how the game is played.  All they really know is that they have money and they respond to promises of making even more money.  And that’s why they’re idiots and why they’re easy to fleece by con men.

Guess what, America?  That’s you!  And the people doing the pump-and-dump pitch are Trump and his cult of red-hat-wearing Trumpets.  Don’t like being told that you’re an idiot?  Too bad.

But even if everything about Trump-Tax does work the way that it is supposed to, even if by some mathematical stretch of the imagination that could only exist in fairy tales we could somehow carry out Trump’s tax fantasy and still balance the budget and work on knocking down the mountain-on-top-of-a-mountain-on-top-of-a-mountain of federal debt and still bring record economic prosperity beyond the dreams of avarice, it doesn’t really solve the problem.  Trump-Tax is just a band-aid at the extreme best, and that’s presuming that it would even do what Trump promises it would do.

The same infrastructure would still be there.  You’d still have to file paperwork every year and account for all the money you make.  People will still complain that they’re being taxed “too much” and that some others are not paying “their fair share”, and the various subdivisions of Big Corporate will demand and get new kinds of deductions and exemptions to replace the ones that Trump-Tax would eliminate.  People would still complain that the Internal Revenue Service is still around.  And Trump will still refuse to release his tax returns because of the IRS.  Nothing would really change overall except a few numbers… oh, and the continued income inequality, but that’s not supposed to matter, right?

By the way, I just got another email from the White House reminding me that I have to inform my readers that Trump won the November election and that nobody thought he would win it and that it is supposedly impossible for anyone in the GOP to ever win the November election, never mind at the “overwhelming super-awesome-bigly-majority in the history of human civilization” at the Electoral College.  You know, just in case you haven’t forgotten.  Winning!  Big time!  Tiger Blood!

Let’s get brutally honest here… the issue of healthcare is only as complicated as Big Corporate wants to be. But taxes?  That’s a whole level of complicated that makes healthcare look like a game of tic-tac-toe.  Financial services can only make big money as long as the tax system is still complex and complicated.  And as long as the system is complex and complicated, governments of all sizes can dangle tax breaks as incentives for businesses to come and stay in the area.

Consider this hypothetical statement: “Mister President, we’d like nothing more than to use American workers for the businesses we’d like to set up in America, using American materials for Americans products to sell to the American people, but it is a whole lot cheaper for us to set up our shops in Mexico, use materials from China, bring in workers from India, and then pay the import tax to bring the finished goods in so your American people can buy them in Wal-Mart. Now what incentive can you give us to change our minds?” 

Now if Trump is looking for yet another “win” for his “Buy American, Hire American” scheme, do you think he wouldn’t sacrifice a little of his Trump-Tax to do it? 

That’s how the game is played, and it can only happen if the tax system remains complex and complicated.

And I would be completely remiss if I didn’t point out that all of this, every bit of the Trump-Tax plan is dependent on the GOP-controlled Congress passing it for him to sign into law.  Trump can blame the dickless Democrats all he wants to in his regular Twitter-tantrums – and he has, repeatedly – but they really are dickless in terms of stopping the GOP if Trump’s party can get their act together.  Unlike Trumpaconallus, the GOP in Congress, especially the supposed “master budget maker” Speaker Paul Ryan, are the ones that have to make the numbers work.  They have to find the funds to pay for every one of Trump’s pie-in-the-sky platitudes and his ego-driven crusades.  They have to fund the Trump Wall before it can be built.  They have to repeal the Obamacare taxes and subsidies and somehow not get blamed when Big Healthcare decide to further screw over the American people because of it.  They have to pay for the trouble that Trump wants to stir up in the world.  And whatever cuts are put in, you know there will be plenty of extreme sadists in the GOP that will think those cuts are not deep “enough” and would be willing to gum up the process until they get their way.  That’s what they did with Trumpcare.

Ultimately Trump-Tax will, in all likelihood, join Trump Water and Trump Steaks and Trump University and his various Trump casinos, not to mention Trumpcare, in yet another Trump-brand failure.  But it’s not his fault, don’t you know?  He’s just the ideas guy.  He’s the one that sets the goals.  It’s everyone else that have to make it work for him so he can claim the credit.  After all, it is his brand on it.

By the way, have I mentioned that Trump won the November election and that nobody has ever thought that he, never mind anyone in the GOP, could ever win in a November election at all in the history of the universe?  Gotta get that in there.  It’s almost a law, if not an executive order.  Because, you know, that’s just how a narcissist rolls.