The stench of Trump’s self-dealing
The political system is rigged for the richest insiders in America.
When we talk about the insider, who are we talking about? It’s the comfortable politician only looking out for his own interest. It is the lobbyist who knows how to put that perfect loophole in every single bill to get richer and richer and richer at your expense.
The richest Americans are paying nothing, and it is ridiculous. These guys shift paper around, and they get lucky. These hedge-fund guys are getting away with murder, when you have one who is making $200 million a year and paying very low taxes. It’s not fair. And it tells people a lot. The middle class is getting absolutely destroyed. This country won’t have a middle class soon. It’s got to end.
.. What fools Trump made of those Midwestern voters who wanted the reality star to go after Washington and New York elites. As “Too Big to Fail” author Andrew Ross Sorkin reported this week, “If you’re a billionaire with your own company and are happy to use your private jet so you can ‘commute’ from a low-tax state, the plan is a godsend. . . ... Those rich insiders whom Trump walloped on his way to the White House will get more than 80 percent of this tax plan’s benefits at the end of a decade... such a massive giveaway to the very hedge-fund managers and real estate executives he promised as a candidate to confront only adds to the stench of self-dealing that engulfs all things Trump. Like autocrats across the world, the 45th American president has perfected the art of the self-deal... There will be no justification for having thrown on an additional $1.5 trillion to our existing $20 trillion debt — at a time when unemployment was low, consumer confidence was high and Wall Street was setting records by the day... It should be painfully obvious to a first-year economics student that there is no rational reason to pass massive tax breaks for billionaires when the economy is humming along. The only justification can be political.
.. Trump was right to say then that the political system is rigged for the richest of Americans. Unfortunately, it is now Trump’s working-class supporters who will pay the highest price for believing any promise that tumbled out of the mouth of the phony plutocratic populist.