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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:
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.
Discrepancies between say property tax valuations and what he submitted. These always differ on everyone’s property.
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.
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
Prosecutors will never comment on such matters. Why do journalists always do this.
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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