By Brian McKay
You go to play a round of 18 and are told its $750, so please get off the fucking course.
You go to stay in the hotel and are told the rooms are $500 a night, so please leave the lobby because it is clear you eat off the dollar menu at McDonalds.
Why the fuck are you voting for the very same person that you wouldn’t be good enough to patronize his properties?
That is the whole problem here. An entire cross section of America has bought into the very idea that this guy is successful and can bring America back to stellar growth. The term “the greatest jobs president that God ever created” has completely taken over the fact that neither you or I would even be welcome at any property bearing his name. We can sit here in the trailer park all we want and look for a savior, but this disconnected asshole surely isn’t it.
Sure, you might say, “He is a successful businessman.” Is he really? The FEC (Federal Election Commission) report he submitted today only has check boxes for $50,000,000 or more. The claims of a $10 billion net worth surely can’t be validated from those check boxes. He claims no need to release his tax forms because of his 104 page FEC submittal. Every Presidential candidate since 1976 has done so. Trump won’t do it because his claims of a $10 billion net worth are complete bullshit. If he runs his businesses like his tax and economic proposals, they have to be.
Yes, I will say they are complete and total bullshit right now. If The Donald wants to call me out on that he can go ahead and show the proof. I can’t play on his goddamn golf course if I wanted to, but I possess enough common sense and logic to securely declare that he is full of shit. Bring it on Trump!
How do I know this? Because if you run your business anywhere near the complete asinine presumptions of your tax plan, you aren’t a businessman. No, you are a self-promoter that gets lucky. No reasonable businessman in the world would accept the bullshit you are selling in your tax plan.
So… first you want to compress all of the current seven tax brackets to three: 10 percent, 20 percent and 25 percent. The standard deduction would increase to $25,000 per person and $50,000 for joint filers, indexed to inflation.
You have decided to cap taxes on dividends and capital gains at 20 percent with some limits on itemized deductions. Also, you would repeal the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), The Estate Tax and the Gift Tax.
Furthermore, you wish to cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent and also make that the highest pass through rate for business entities like LLCs and S-Corps. If Apple and other companies bring their overseas profits back to the U.S., they get the amazing deal of a 10 percent tax that is payable over 10 years. 10 years! Then in the future their overseas profits are only taxed at 10 percent. Well, holy shit. That golf course that you screwed an entire Scottish village over will only have to pay 10 percent taxes to repatriate its profits.
What a great deal for you.
Does this all sound like an absolute bargain for the rich? That is because it absolutely is. In fact, it is such a great bargain that Federal revenues are expected to come up $9.6 trillion short over a decade, with Trump providing no proposal on how that would be compensated for. With the Trump plan in effect, the national debt would increase to 80 percent of GDP by 2036. No matter how much even the most optimistic supply sider thinks that will grow the economy to recoup the lost tax revenue, it still won’t be enough. We might as well say, “Fuck you, and forget having decent highways” to our future generations. That is the Trump plan.
As zenruption has shown in the past, trickle down doesn’t work and doesn’t grow the economy one bit. A candidate is welcome to call himself the “greatest jobs creator God ever created”, but I am more than happy to wager every dime that I have that there is no way in hell he could even come close to hitting a quarter of the growth numbers he needs to compensate for his plan. In an advanced economy, it is even harder. Unless the Orange One has the keys to the next Industrial Revolution locked away with the chastity belt he puts on his wife while touring the country (he does have very small hands you know), there is no way the mythological 3.5% - 4% growth could ever be achieved.
Let’s be brutally honest. If he ran his companies with the same psychosis of his tax plan, they simply couldn’t exist. If this guy ran his hotel the same way, he would cut room rates to $50 a night and pimp out his hot wife just to hope he made up for the lack of revenue. Certainly there would be far more bankruptcies to come in the future than just his four in the past.
One is left to assume that he has hired people that actually know a thing or two about actual accounting, but maybe not. This is why I am firmly convinced that his claimed net worth is pure bullshit. He is a salesman. Nothing more.
Okay… so his net worth is probably bullshit and his business acumen is bullshit. His tax plan is complete crap and you and me would still not be welcome in his hotel. Why is it that the blue collar crowd and evangelic constituency would even consider voting for this guy? He is as far from their world view as is humanly possible.
Is it magic? Is it marketing? Or is it just a desperate desire that some braggart jackass can reverse 30 years of setbacks to the average American with even more extreme versions of the policies most don’t realize have never worked in the first place? This is no magic man and most likely all he has ever been is pure marketing. If you pride yourself on not buying the late night infomercial bullshit, that is what you are now buying with a vote for this guy. The thing won’t ever work, the warranty won’t ever be honored and the shipping and handling are 10 times more expensive than they reasonably should be.
All it is and all it ever will be is an ever changing reality distortion field from a business moron that has to lie about his net worth and his sexual veracity. And no, you will never be welcome in his hotel or on his fucking golf course.
Brian McKay is a co-founder of zenruption. His greatest dream in life has suddenly become the ability to have a one on one debate with Donald Trump. We have no doubt he could handle the Donald with an explicit stream of expletives and a really rare well formed thought.
Feature photo courtesy of Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license