Funny stuff: the Times and the Trump tax stroy
[Hat tip: AesopFan]
I can just picture the The New York Times gathering a team of actuaries, legal accountants, tax historians, advisers and financial consultants around a big executive office table, piled high with reams of papers and spent coffee cups, saying:
“We’ve got him now…. as soon as people understand: fixed asset depreciation schedules; and if the assets were depreciated legally using straight line or diminishing balance; then we move to whole-value equity pick-up, or minority interest accounting; before digging into section 1031 ‘like-kind’ asset exchanges; partnerships (limited or writ large), carried interest loopholes, pass-throughs, net capital losses/gains, seven-year income averaging and the difference between long-term and short-term capital gains”…
…or something.
Seriously, the ‘Trump-taxes’ story has to be the biggest, funniest, most well documented, and most absurd, ongoing snipe hunt in history. “I was going to support President Trump’s re-election until I saw his depreciated amortization schedule from 1989?”… said no-one, like, ever.
As I said, it’s funny.
But to be serious for a minute, that’s not what the Times was counting on at all in publishing the story. First of all, they need to keep the Trump attacks coming, so even though they probably knew it was a relatively weak story it may have been all they could come up with that particular day. Secondly, they are counting on readers not really understanding the ins and outs of the tax code for businesses of the size and complexity of Trump’s. Most of us don’t, and I certainly don’t, but they were trusting that Trump-haters and even Trump-dislikers would think boy, he says he’s so rich but he lost so much money as well as boy, for a man living so high on the hog he certainly didn’t pay much in taxes compared to me.
“stroy”?
Yeah, uh, sure, kevino (work with me here since we’re in the realm of risible stuff), stroy . . . it’s just the NYT forgot to include the “des” portion of their Trump crushing article.
Yeah, that’s it. Just slipped their notice.
The whole story is collapsing as people have been pointing out that all this was not only widely known at the time, but Trump even wrote a book about his fall and rise — “The Art of the Comeback” but announced his losses — and subsequent recovery — on the Apprentice. It’s hilarious!
Or Neo’s.
It was funny to read the headlines, following this ridiculous Times story, about how Trump had talked about his financial problems of that era on an Apprentice episode. Big scoop, NYT!
Ha! My favorite line in that is “snipe hunt”! I haven’t heard that since I was in boy scouts and the older boys sent the younger scouts on a “snipe hunt”!
Yea, from now on I am going to refer to what the Democrats and the Press are doing by looking for a “gotcha” on Trump as a snipe hunt.
Or, maybe, they could go ask the Russians if they have a “bacon stretcher”?
NYT doesn’t care that some people already know about the rise and fall of The Donald. They know that a considerable number have NOT, and will have exactly the reactions Neo suggested.
Look at all the stories that have been debunked, sometimes more than once, which the Times and WaPo et al. continue to recycle, knowing there will be some readers who haven’t heard the rebuttals; others who have, and rejected the arguments against their story; and others who know they are rehashing “old news” and don’t care.
You will remember, of course, that any time the Right brings up a story about the Left that happened sometime in the past (like, anything before yesterday), which are generally true accounts, the MSM dismisses it as “old news” and not worth talking about, because they can’t rebut it and don’t want it impinging on their supporters’ consciousness.
OMG! Trump took chances! Sometimes he lost!
I’m sure the IRS combed through his returns and got every last penny they could.
There’s not there there, but that has never stopped the NYT.
NYT owns many small town papers, which print NYT stories (and I mean stories) routinely. Those papers really don’t need much actual staff in this digital era.
So the NYT is not only talking to libs like my brother, who reads the NYT like the Bible daily in Washington state; it is also talking to the Deplorables in Flyover Country.
USA Today does the same, owns my local paper, which is fishwrap; even laid off its liberal op-ed people some years ago.
So between their local pseudo-newspaper and the major TV networks, those people have no resource other than on-line.