Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Kaine and Pence was thankfully light on comments about illegal email servers, but unfortunately too much was made of Trump’s not paying personal income tax for several years.
The fact he lost nearly $1 billion in the 1990s is not news. Everyone heard about the failures of his Atlantic City casinos at the time that they occurred. The world at that time expected the author of “The Art of the Deal” to go down like a sinking ship. Trump cleared up all our questions in 1997 with “The Art of the Comeback.” Pick it up and read it if you want the full, unedited story straight from the horse’s mouth.
At issue in 2016 is whether he “took advantage” of tax laws at the time to avoid paying personal income tax for several years after his loss. Yes, he did take advantage of those laws. The thing is, any other entrepreneurial real estate developer who experienced a loss, regardless of the scope, either did or should have taken advantage of the tax laws too - something Pence alluded to last night. It’s not a mark of brilliance or genius. It’s simply business.
The tax laws in our country are designed to either encourage or discourage certain behaviors in its citizens. Our country has a tradition of rewarding those who choose to invest in real property. We do this because it encourages financial stability on the whole. For most, that encouragement comes by way of the mortgage interest deduction on our federal income taxes each year. It encourages us to buy instead of rent if we are able. Buyers tend to put money back into property, and they tend to take ownership of their communities, and we can all deduce the vast benefits of that.
For those who choose to make a career of real estate development, there are many risks, and without beneficial tax laws, we’d see little in the way of progress and development. So, it is clear that Trump has turned out to be an above average success in the realm of real estate.
The question is, are we ready to believe that the skills he’s accumulated there are truly compatible and transferable to the top position of the public sector, the President of the United States? The old question about whether you’d hire a doctor to fix your plumbing seems apropos here.