Some Trump delegates and their alternates should write him an open letter demanding his unredacted tax returns. If he declines, they should declare they will abstain on the first ballot of the convention, driving him below the number needed to nominate. The delegates should not give Republicans a time bomb that could help take down GOP control of the House or the Senate, or both.
.. “What will you do if the returns come out as part of an October surprise?” Trump was asked. Trump pondered the question and replied, “I’ll say they aren’t mine.” That stunning answer is the essence of Donald Trump.
.. But while Donald Trump has made a life out of bluffing his way past problems and cavalier comments, it’s harder to succeed doing that at the presidential level.
.. The answer could lie in Trump’s 40-year business career, during which he has assembled an empire of great complexity along with a record of serial credibility problems. In other words, he often “makes stuff up.” This is a man who said under oath, in a 2008 deposition in an ultimately failed $5 billion libel suit Trump launched against Timothy O’Brien, a reporter for the New York Times at the time: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”
.. A New Jersey superior-court judge concluded that Trump was an untrustworthy source of financial data on himself. That decision was upheld by a three-judge appeals court, which noted that the “materials that Trump claims to have provided to O’Brien were incomplete and unaudited.”
.. So it’s no surprise that, for example, Trump listed a New York golf club he owned as being worth $50 million. But in a lawsuit over the property, he told a judge the very same club was worth only $1.4 million.
.. Then there is charity. “It is possible that his tax returns will reveal that he is not generous generally, or not generous specifically with respect to causes — like veterans — that Mr. Trump suggests he supports,” Wood wrote. Trump might also have problems with overseas tax shelters.
Trump will find that fierce nationalism goes only so far
This Trumpian view of the world, and of how his country fits into it, is something we have seen before in many places and at many points in history: the blaming of others for misfortunes. Sometimes the enemies are within (Communists, racial and religious minorities); sometimes they lurk abroad.
A strong and confident United States would never succumb to this appeal, and perhaps, in November, most of the country will have seen the appeal for what it is: a dangerous diversion.
.. These anxieties relate in part to Americans’ own choices: an unwillingness to tax themselves sufficiently to pay for programs; income inequalities that have been allowed to grow; a political system that is dysfunctional, grossly distorted by money, gerrymandering and inflamed partisanship; a financial system so loosely regulated and consumed by greed that its collapse in 2008 is still being felt; misguided foreign military adventures. But these observations are too toxic for domestic consumption.
.. So we have the plutocrat as the worker’s friend. The deal maker whose foreign policy will be a unilateral set of demands. The free-trade critic who has made lots of money outside the United States. The neophyte who almost revels in his ignorance, because knowledge breeds an understanding of complexity, and who proposes his daughter as an adviser in the White House.
The One Thing, Historically, That’s Prompted Countries to Raise Taxes on the Rich
“The key events we see in driving that inverted U-shape are mass mobilization for war,” Scheve explains. When countries (especially democratic ones) mobilized for war, questions about fairness came to a head, because—even during nationwide drafts—it was most often the lower and middle classes that were on the front lines. “The actual rhetoric of the times was, if you’re going to conscript labor, you need to conscript capital,” Scheve says.
.. Scheve and Stasavage explain the story of taxation in the past two centuries with what they call the compensatory theory of taxation—the (fairly intuitive) idea that higher tax rates will be accepted as fair only if there’s a consensus, across all earners, that the rich are getting more benefits from the state than they’re contributing in tax revenues.
Bernie’s Economics may not be feasible but it is useful
Known as the institutionalists, they believed that institutions, more than market forces, determined the distribution of goods in a society. As a group, they were more united by what they disliked in conventional economics than by what they agreed on. But they agreed that there was huge opportunity to improve the human condition by transforming the institutions that made up our society. They generally wanted stronger labor unions and weaker corporations. They wanted the government to play a continuously active role in regulating what they saw as the predatory practices of business.
.. Over the last 75 years, the actual people designing Republican economic policies — figures like Martin Feldstein, Gregory Mankiw, Glenn Hubbard — have nearly all relied on Keynesian principles and models of the economy. Even Milton Friedman, the most effective critic from the Chicago school, experimented with Keynesian ideas early in his career, and his proposals that actually affected government policy (the Federal Reserve’s approach to inflation, the earned-income tax credit, automatic tax deduction from payrolls) fit neatly into a Keynesian mode of thinking.
.. I spoke with Warren Gunnels, Sanders’s policy director, and he told me that the senator doesn’t believe there is a trade-off to be made.
.. It will inspire such enthusiasm and determination that more people will work harder and invest more, and the country will easily generate the tax income to pay for it. Hence, Sanders’s plans won’t cost money; they’ll raise money.