Point the first: He’s partially running on his acumen as a businessman, and he lost a sum amounting to nearly (in GD, being on my last warning, I’d best phrase it as) A BILLION MOTHER HUMPING DOLLARS. Obligatory cite, this was 2% of all US business losses that year. On a CASINO. How does anybody lose money on a casino, much less 2% of all business losses in a very lucrative year for business in the US?
Point the second: Someone will have already mentioned this downthread, but if we’re all A-OK with Trump legally gaming the system to avoid taxes for 20 years, then I never want to hear another conservative gripe about someone gaming the welfare system to buy milk and bread and maybe a premium cable channel.
Well, the casino on the river in New Orleans is losing money, in my understanding. But not that much. If Trump is more incompetent than the government of Louisiana, we need to keep him far away from Washington.
Maybe Moscow, and not Idaho.
Difference is Trump is building casinos for the benefit of society. Welfare people just produce more kids that are going to either be on welfare themselves or jail.
Man, you seemed so OK for a minute. Now we’re gonna have to spar.
Point the first: There is no cite you can provide that even incidentally suggests Trump ever built anything for the benefit of anything except Trump. In fact, most evidence suggests that Trump’s done a fairly shitty job of building things for the benefit of Trump. Losing a billion bucks and liquidating a business is not exactly a redounding testament to creating jobs or values.
Point the second: If you’re saying that people have the right to entertain themselves in economically destructive ways, as a soft libertarian I can’t argue against that. However, it’s exhaustively documented that casinos destroy wealth and damage society. Engines of prosperity, they ain’t, except for the rent-seekers privileged to run the enterprise.
I’m not sure how a man’s net worth decreasing by $900 million can be rendered meaningless merely because he didn’t physically hand over a two-story stack of money bags.
When he loses $915 million in a year and still manages to acquire a Boeing 727 at the same time for his own personal use, and has it registered in Bermuda by the way, despite reporting only $10 million in total personal income, indicates to me that the meaning of losing $915 million is substantially less than your average American losing any amount of money at all.
I’m not sure what your point is. Ross Perot and Steve Forbes made runs for the presidency on the basis of their business acumen. Had either of them had a year of quote colossal failure in which they reported losses of nearly $1 billion, it’d be fair game.
If a state governor had presided over his or her state’s economic collapse, that’d also be fair game, regardless of party affiliation.
That article says that someone with something to gain thinks she probably broke the law. If that’s good enough for you, then okay, but it’s not close to good enough for me.
That’s one of the shady-looking things with Trump’s returns - Trump taking losses that weren’t really his to take and using them to offset his actual profit. It’s not imaginary money versus cash-in-your-hand money.
I mentioned in another thread, maybe it’s this thread I’m not sure it’s late, that if everyone assumes that Clinton has won the election the next 5 weeks or so are going to be sort of boring. So it is a bit of playing Trumpil’s advocate with that statement about the casinos.
It was meant be farcical. You guys have to realize that this election is borderline absurd at this point.
Normally, I don’t argue a contrary position just to argue a contrary position in that manner but I did think it was humorous because it is bit over the top yet actually sounds like an argument that someone might make. I do have a question for the mods though. Is it permissible for the sake of exploring an argument and to further a discussion to advocate a contrary point of view?
Taking the loss off his taxable income is exactly what he was supposed to do once he took that loss. And it’s not a secret that he has gone bankrupt more than once.
But if he’s still paying relatively low taxes, more than eighteen years later it does show that he probably really never got to be even richer and even bigger. He’s more hat than cattle now.
