Just to put a capper on how cynical the Republican "tax plan" is, it takes a special kind of fealty, and/or blind loyalty, and/or crookedness to come up with a tax plan that just happens to give Donald Trump's own personal companies everything that they could ask for.
“Real estate does great,” said Daniel N. Shaviro, a professor of taxation at New York University Law School, who as a congressional staff member helped write the 1986 tax overhaul. “It’s hard to imagine what they might have asked for that they don’t have.”
Real estate investment trusts, known as REITs, have extra cause for celebration. They are companies that make money by owning, financing and operating real estate. Both the Trump Organization and Kushner Companies, the family real estate firm partly owned by Mr. Kushner, have important deals with such trusts.
That the Senate would just happen to come up with tax breaks aimed squarely at boosting the profits of the White House Garbage Fire is yet another peculiarity of the hastily assembled bill. And we will note again that Trump has not divested from his businesses and has a clause in place to allow him to reap the profits of those businesses the moment he leaves office, if he even bothers to hold out that long.
And while we know that Donald Trump (and the as-of-yet-not-indicted Jared Kushner) will have his taxes slashed substantially by these new proposals, we do not know the full amount because Trump, alone in modern history, has refused to reveal it.
For that matter, we also know that Donald Trump's favored industry is already, thanks to complexity and to some intentional decisions by the House and Senate, a prime avenue for and beneficiary of foreign money-laundering. At the moment federal investigators are almost certainly probing the extent to which Trump's personal fortune is itself tied up in the sort of Russian laundering schemes that he has already, in past revelations, been identified with. But that is a side note, other than to mean-spiritedly note that it's unclear why an industry so linked to Trump's personal brand of organized crime needs a Republican tax cut. We're allowed to make mean-spirited side notes from time to time because it is one of the few things that keeps any of us sane, in the current news cycle.
Regardless, there you have it. The Republican tax plan really is a tax cut aimed at Donald G.F. Trump, personally. While we were wondering when Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and other Republican leaders were going to finally raise an objection to Donald Trump personally profiting from his presidency—going so far as to bill the Secret Service for renting the golf carts they use to follow him around at his private clubs nearly every weekend—they were busy crafting the man a tax cut so that the money he's funneling into his businesses as president gets new, enormous tax breaks at the rest of our expense.
Do Republican leaders think this will gain them special Mar-a-Lago access privileges? Are they expecting discount coupons for dining in Trump restaurants? Just why are they so intent on kissing this obvious crook's ring?
The GOP Tax Scam is a giveaway to the ultra-rich—but it still needs to pass both houses of Congress before it becomes law. Call your members of the House AGAIN TODAY at (202) 224-3121, and tell them you are absolutely furious and they must vote NO.