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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35180 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Is Trump actually always innocent?

From the Laetita James suit I have to come to the conclusion that he is in fact always innocent. Reddit lefties are salivating that they’ve finally caught their guy. I see three main issues at play:

  1. He likely has some personal guarantees on loans and that’s why he has to submit net worth documents to banks. He was aggressive on some valuations but valuations are subjective. Banks have underwriters for this stuff. And real estate developers always have lofty views on their property valuations. These properties he has loans against the banks would have first underwrote them at the property level before considering a personal guarantee.

  2. Discrepancies between say property tax valuations and what he submitted. These always differ on everyone’s property.

  3. He donated some property for conservation. She’s saying the property had some issues and the value should be lower. His total tax savings were 3.5 million. Assuming 40% federal rates and 10% New York that means he saved 700k in NY. If the properties worth less then maybe he owes NY a couple hundred thousand. This is something you deal with in an audit not a civil case or criminal case.

I can’t comment on the FBI raid as I don’t know anything about what’s normal with classified information. I do know the tax code, accounting, real estate development, banking. And this is just a loud press conference and book report for something that just sounds like an audit.

Also no victims who lost money at any of the banks he did business with. Art of course is a whole legalized fraud of donating after making your art look really valuable. JB pritzker legendarily removed toilets from his house to make it “uninhabitable” and lower his property tax bill. This just breaks down to tax law is complex and people play games to lower their taxes.

At this point, I will have to see Trump being perp-walked in handcuffs before I devote any more time to analyzing his legal travails. Until then, best to do more productive things.

Remember a former Motte poster who was regularly issuing "this time for sure, Trump will be in jail within two weeks, I guarantee it" comments every time Mueller or someone else claimed they had something on Trump? The fact that they are still trying to get him, after all this time, reminds me of the Clinton Whitewater thing where it definitely turned from 'investigation into possible wrong-doing' into 'personal vendetta to get them'.

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

This will be the end of Trump's campaign!

At the very least, it's an attempt to garner brownie points by being seen attempting to get him.

Indeed, its best for all that he not get got, since once he's got, then there's no more glory to be earned by trying to get him anymore.

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Trump was not a great president, but I never expected him to be. I expected him to be pretty much as it turned out, that he could never achieve what he claimed he wanted to achieve, but also that he was not the combination of Hitler and Stalin who would start a nuclear war with Korea and kick off the Third World War while his administration threw LGBT people into torture camps and cut down the redwoods for commercial firewood that the opposition claimed.

The best way for the Democrats to deal with Trump, after he lost, was to ignore him. Instead, they've spent all this time creating a boogey-man out of him, painting him and MAGA America as the Greatest Threat To Anything, Ever so that right now he remains as relevant and influential as ever. They could have let him sink into obscurity in retirement, to be futilely flailing around on social media for people to laugh at, but they didn't.

Now they have created the very real possibility of Trump as 2024 candidate, and even worse, a viable one not a joke one. This is so self-defeating on their part, I can't understand it. Yes, Trump's an easy target and all they have to do is keep churning out the same old rhetoric about him, but by ignoring him they would cut all his pretensions to power. Find another Republican boogey-man (I think DeSantis is a good choice) to rile the base up about, and let Trump fall out of notice. But no, they couldn't let it go that he beat their Sure Thing in 2016, and they keep shooting themselves in the same foot over and over.

I think a fair amount of people are going to look at culture war cases, and think "If the Democrats are for X which I think is appalling, and the Democrats are telling me Trump is against X, maybe this time round I'll hold my nose and vote for Trump" - or at least, vote for the Republican candidate running in the local election (see Virginia).

Imagine a Trump presidency 2.0. One can hope that surely this time he will drain the swamp after all of this. From an accelerationist perspective it would be glorious at the very least.

How is protesting the Government and requesting redress "evil and contemptible," even if you were 100% wrong about everything you believed?

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@urquan didn't make that claim, and it's uncharitable to rephrase his words in the way you did. Presumably, he is referring to the people who charged into the Capitol and then ran around taking photos, carrying off pieces of furniture, and what have you. While I certainly think that "evil and contemptible" is too harsh an assessment, those people were also definitely going beyond simply protesting and requesting redress from the government.

I expected Trump having some corrupt deals - I mean, he's a billionaire RE developer from New York, he must have cut some corners and greased some palms. But I see that they are digging into him for 6 years now, with all force of the FBI, DOJ and every Democrat local prosecutor in the nation, and so far they got zilch. I mean not just zilch as court convictions, the worst thing he did that I know (which I knew before he run for President, actually) is that he lent his name and likeness to a fake university which charged simpletons a lot of money to teach them to make money. Which I guess is a sleazy thing to do but hardly literally Hitler. The rest is just routine stuff where the taxman disagrees with you on the value of some property - as a homeowner paying property taxes (obviously much less than Trump does) I know what it's like. So I am moving to the conclusion there's actually nothing on Trump - at least nothing worth talking about. He is that clean, somehow, otherwise they'd found it by now. That doesn't mean they can't manufacture some crime to get an indictment - partisan control combined with partisan fervor does wonders to the notions of justice - but he looks surprisingly less corrupt than my priors were.

I would not be shocked, shocked! if it turned out Trump et al were involved in dodgy deals.

I also would not be shocked, shocked! if every property and development business in NYC was likewise pulling the same stunts.

It's hard to say how much of this is partisan, and how much is James legit cracking down on fraud and such, since she seems to have taken a few other high-profile cases. But for everyone treating this as if Trump is uniquely corrupt, no, that's not it at all.

I mean, just to take the most straightforward fraud he committed, he deliberately lied about the size of his triplex apartment, inflating its square footage by 3x. Trump claimed it was over 30k square feet (and valued it accordingly) when it was only 11k square feet. Between 2011 and 2012 the reported value of the apartment increased from $80M to $180M due to the fraudulent square footage reports. Then, after Forbes wrote an article about Trump lying about the apartment's size, the valuation dropped to accord with its actual square footage. Between 2016 and 2017 Trump's reported valuation of the apartment dropped from $327M to $116M. Is it being "aggressive" on a valuation to lie about the square footage of the asset being valued by 3x?

Is it being "aggressive" on a valuation to lie about the square footage of the asset being valued by 3x?

I genuinely don't know, was/is this common practice in the NY property market? How did he measure it? Does it depend where you start your measurement, and he started it in one place and the assessor started it in another?

This is nothing but a feeling, but I do think landlords/property rental companies kinda sorta maybe routinely inflate their estimation of square footage of domestic properties to attract potential tenants. I highly doubt Trump himself was going around with a tape measure checking the actual footage.

The question at the center of many of these cases is whether or not there is an acceptable gap between represented and actual square footage. Often, different methods of measurements are used to calculate square footage, which is why parties can disagree as to which is the accurate tally. Liability may depend on the jurisdiction in which your property is located, as well as prior case decisions.

Court case about same sort of dispute:

NEW YORK — Four years ago, Rishi Bhandari and his fiancée put down a deposit on Apartment 3T at 110 Livingston St., the old Board of Education headquarters in downtown Brooklyn that was being converted to condominiums. The price was $795,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment.

Just before they were to close, Bhandari noticed that the living space seemed smaller than he had expected. He returned with a measuring tape, he said, and confirmed his suspicions: The bedrooms, living room and kitchen area covered only 634 square feet, even though the floor plans said they had 743.

Most people view square-foot calculations with the same trust they put in mileage-per-gallon stickers and the weight-loss claims of diet pills. But Bhandari, a lawyer, wanted the price of his apartment reduced by the size of the discrepancy, what an appraiser calculated to be about $111,000. The developer refused, offering to return his deposit, $79,500, plus interest, and to let him walk away.

Bhandari sued, claiming the plans were deceptive. Real-estate lawyers say it is rare for such disputes to go to trial, but Monday, that is what will happen when the case of the missing 109 square feet begins in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Not just in NYC, either:

One of the best advice I've seen on this board is to bring a tape measure to the open house. We've been looking at apartments in DOBRO, Williamsburg, LIC and Manhattan and the discrepancy in square footage goes from small to fraud. It's ridiculous that an apartment can be listed 25% larger than it really is when the price is so intertwined with square footage. I've noticed especially with new development there is this size inflation. We should list particularly egregious examples of size inflation. Buyer beware indeed.

So was Trump naughty naughty? Very likely. Was he the only one at it? Not at all.

Why would he do it, though? What’s the gain? If someone were to buy an apartment from him, he’d notice that it’s a third of its advertised size, so no buyer would ever be defrauded. Similarly, higher valuation means higher property taxes, so overstating value of his apartment is a loss for him. Seriously, why would he do that? What for?

I think the idea is that he could use that inflated valuation as leverage for loans that he otherwise would not have been able to get.

But nobody’s claiming he wasn’t paying back those loans. He’s basically inflating his credit score and then making money for those lenders?

When I saw this NY case hit the headlines I immediately wondered what year elections would next be held for the NY AG. Imagine my surprise when I learned they were in fact this year.

Every year is like 2016. I don't think I have seen anyone as persistently hounded as Trump. Generally, it would work to trump's advantage to deflate the value of his properties and net worth to pay less taxes ,although there are benefits to inflating the value too .

from the NYTs https://archive.ph/ZHL16

She concluded that Mr. Trump and his business violated state criminal laws and “plausibly” broke federal laws as well. Her office, which lacks authority to file criminal charges in this case, referred the findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. They declined to comment on whether they would investigate.

Prosecutors will never comment on such matters. Why do journalists always do this.

The company also routinely spurned the assessments of outside experts. After a bank ordered an appraisal that found 40 Wall Street was worth $200 million, the Trumps promptly valued it at well over twice that amount. Overall, the lawsuit said that 11 of Mr. Trump’s annual financial statements included more than 200 false and misleading asset valuations.

It's not uncommon for there to be considerable variance in appraisals though. In a single neighborhood homes may sell for $1-5 million despite some of the expensive homes only being slightly bigger. It's conceivable Trump believes it's worth $400 million. Or another way, a property owner does not have to accept the apprised value as being correct or adhortative; it's just an estimate. Nor does the counter-party in a negotiation. Both parties can hire appraisers and then arrive at that they deem a fair value.

Trump doesn’t have much incentive to deflate property values for taxes since America doesn’t tax net worth but taxes realized gains from transactions.

The one exception is property taxes. Which is a weird system and the goal is not necessarily to get prices right but to get relative value correct. But that has a process which is basically government hired an appraiser to say your buildings worth $x. But often it’s more that it’s worth x% of the total market of the city and they use a fudge factor. In Chicago and it’s similar everywhere the appraiser says your building is worth X. Everyone then hires a politically connected lawyer to debate the value and then the price gets reduced 10-20%.

For property taxes, most cities have a cap on how much they can go up each year. This is to 'protect grandma', so that property taxes don't push her out of her home. If grandma sells, the property is reassessed, and the taxes can increase significantly.

Anyways, you'll notice that Trump owns some 500 'businesses'. Most of these are LLCs with a single property attached to them. The reason you do this is so that when you buy or sell a property, it isn't technically changing hands. Instead you're buying/selling the LLC, which owns the property. No tax reassessment, which means you keep those low rates locked in indefinitely.

Property taxes work that way in California, but I don't think they work that way in NYC. NYCs property tax system, however, IS extremely byzantine.

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