straightUp Loc: California

That depends. Many times, that verbosity is actually a rational argument that will appear to be excessive verbiage to readers who have already jumped to premature conclusions.

straightUp Loc: California

dude... if you can't handle me, you should stop engaging. I mean if these conversations are making you sweat... that just doesn't sound healthy.

America 1 Loc: South Miami

You lie
In March 2016, Forbes estimated his net worth at $4.5 billion.
A year later, shortly after his inauguration, they lowered it by $1 billion, and by the end of his presidential term, they had subtracted yet another $1 billion.

Donald Trump's wealth takes a tumble during his presidency
Donald Trump's net worth dropped by about $700m to $2.3bn (£1.65bn) during his time as president, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit his fortunes hard, with Mr. Trump's office buildings, branded hotels, and resorts losing revenue and falling in value.
His fleet of planes and golf courses have also seen drops in their value.
Mr. Trump is currently under a criminal investigation into his financial affairs and his family business.

Former President Trump’s net worth dropped by approximately $700 million during his presidency, according to an analysis from Bloomberg News.
According to Bloomberg, Trump’s net worth fell from $3 billion to $2.3 billion, with the coronavirus pandemic and fallout from the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol breach both heavily impacting his business empire.
Many of Trump’s businesses — hotels, casinos, and office spaces — have been decimated by the pandemic as workplaces shut down and tourism came to a halt due to global travel restrictions.
“The fallout from the Capitol assault has hurt his relationships with brokers and lenders.
At least $590 million in loans come due in the next four years, more than half personally guaranteed by Trump, and his scrapyard of failed enterprises has only gotten more crowded,” Bloomberg writes.



The Hill has reached out to the Trump Organization for comment.
Bloomberg estimates that the value of Trump’s commercial real estate properties dropped by 26 percent between 2016 and 2021, currently valued at $1.7 billion. His commercial real estate businesses account for roughly three-quarters of his wealth, Bloomberg notes.
The value of Trump’s hotels and resorts reportedly took an even greater hit, falling by 42 percent between 2015 and 2021 and incurring debts worth $330 million that are personally guaranteed by the former president.
The value of his other properties such as residential buildings, books and entertainment deals all dropped by more than 80 percent.
Despite these losses, Bloomberg notes that Trump has bounced back from financial failures in the past.
“A post-pandemic economic recovery could reinflate the value of his properties.
He could continue his run of bestsellers, pivot back to television, or start a rival to the social media platforms that have shunned him. Even if things go poorly, he could make the best of losses by using them to slash his tax bills, as he’s done for years,” the outlet writes.
Trump’s businesses are currently under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
In February it was reported that Manhattan prosecutors had obtained Trump’s tax returns.
And in early March sources told the Wall Street Journal that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. (D) was intensifying his probe into Trump’s Seven Springs Estate to find if he had inflated the property’s value to gain greater benefits from financial institutions.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/543672-trumps-net-worth-dropped-by-700-million-during-presidency/


IRS data proves Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class Americans most
Income data published by the IRS clearly show that on average all income brackets benefited substantially from the Republicans’ tax reform law, with the biggest beneficiaries being working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent, as so many Democrats have argued.

A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax credits and other reforms to the tax code, shows that filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, the first year Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data is available.
Filers who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break of about 15 percent to 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 in adjusted gross income saw their personal income taxes cut by around 11 percent to 13 percent.
By comparison, no income group with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut exceeding 9 percent, and the average tax cut for brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent. (For more detailed data, see my table published here.)

That means most middle-income and working-class earners enjoyed a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning $1 million or more.

What’s more, IRS data shows earners in higher income brackets contributed a bigger slice of the total income tax revenue pie following the passage of the tax reform law than they had in the previous year.

In fact, every income bracket with filers earning $200,000 or more increased its tax burden in 2018 compared to 2017, and every income bracket with a top limit lower than $200,000 paid a smaller proportion of the total personal tax revenue collected.

That means that Republicans’ tax reform law resulted in the tax code becoming slightly more progressive — the exact opposite of what Democrats have claimed over the past four years.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/584190-irs-data-prove-trump-tax-cuts-benefited-middle-working-class-americans-most/

How did I use his position to rob the taxpayers or anybody?
It appears you are wasted on drugs or alcohol with your obnoxious false rant

straightUp Loc: California

Yeah, I was noticing the back and forth on Trump's donations. According to his returns, he made contributions but he also fought hard not to disclose his taxes and Congress had to pretty much drag it out of him. I suspect that in the meantime Trump was working with advisors to make his returns look more charitable.

On the other hand, he consumed tax money like a glutton. His family was still conducting the business (that he was supposed to divest from) and the SS was assigned to all their business trips and vacations because they also have to protect the family. Records show that the Trump family took 12 times more protected trips than the Obama family did PER YEAR!

Then add the fact that the Trumps often used their own resorts, forcing the security teams to rent rooms from the Trump family. So the government was effectively paying the Trump family just to protect them.

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/trump-family-travel-12x-obama-family/

It's amazing to see people still supporting him... The only explanation I can think of is that they are blindly obsessed with distractions and prejudices.

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

straightUp Loc: California

You're still clinging to that fake birth certificate story? LOL


We don't WANT to seal the border.


He DID set a national budget.


Not his fault that racists got all wigged out over a black president.


That's because spending was being funded by taxes instead of borrowed money which is added to the national debt, which is the way Republicans typically do it. Two reasons why raising taxes are better...
1. It has to go through our representatives in Congress.
2. Taxes don't incur interest like borrowed money does.

Two reasons why Republicans prefer to borrow money for their spending...
1. The spending doesn't have to go through Congress so the people don't even need to know about it.
2. They can hit the election cycle and say they didn't raise taxes.

You people are such dumbfks that you can't figure this out.


That was already their own money. All Obama did is unfreeze their assets in exchange for signing the agreement that lets us monitor their nuclear program. As far as I am concerned, we don't have a valid right to freeze assets in the first place. Do you think the government has a right to take all your money just because it's in dollars? If the government blocked your access to your own money for a day then unblocked it, would you say the government was *giving* you money? 'cause that's essentially what your claim is saying.


Most immigrants at the border ARE Christians so you can say that Trump has also been refusing Christians at the border. As for the millions of destructive Islamic radicals... where? I don't see them. I see lots of legal Muslim immigrants but I don't see them doing anything wrong.


All this obsession with his "sexual perversions" is coming from right-wing weirdos that for some reason know all about perverted culture.


The quantitative easing was temporary and many economists agreed that it was needed to help us recover from the economic crash that Bush created before handing it to Obama to fix.


$535 million does not equal billions, drama queen.


The idea was to trace the guns to catch the main players in the gun smuggling operations. Obama approved but the operations were actually controlled at local levels. 10 city governments have been implicated.


Not even close. The ACA is a market-based system. The only thing remotely "socialist" was the public option which was taken out because the insurance companies freaked out over the prospect of competing with a low-cost option and Republicans sided with them because they ALWAYS defend the right to screw people.


The Russian collusion story wasn't fake, it just didn't lead to any evidence that it had any significant impact on the election. Even when it was happening, I knew Russian influence was an issue but not because of Trump. The Russian influence wasn't even intentional... it just so happens that there was a lot of webmasters running social media sites in Russia that Americans frequently visit (without realizing it's run by Russians) and these webmasters knew that the best way to make money is to host content that guarantees the most traffic so they can maximize the clicks on their ads. It just so happens that right-wing politics on social media is the #1 choice for syndication because the people who read it are so obsessed that it guarantees the highest number of clicks on the ads.

As a result, social-media in America was plastered with right-wing political opinions. Some of the webmasters even admitted that they wouldn't even read the content because they don't understand English. They were just syndicating... taking right-wing content from America and reposting it back to America so they can read it again on a different site, and hopefully click on some ads along the way.


There was never an illegal server. Clinton was using a private server but it wasn't illegal. It wasn't even the first example. Colin Powell also used a private server. Since then, private servers have continued to be used, even Ivanka used a private server for official White House business.

The issue was whether or not the private server was used for transmitting confidential information but the investigators couldn't find any. Yes, Clinton deleted a lot of e-mail but so does everyone else. It's not illegal to delete your old e-mail messages.

In the end, none of the courts or any of the numerous investigations that Republicans spent millions of tax dollars on found anything illegal. They gave her a slap on the hand for not being more careful but that's it. There's no proof that she actually transmitted secrets.

I guess this is another turd that you folks will never be able to let go of.


I don't know if I want anything from the president of Kenya. But I'm pretty happy with what the pro-American, capitalist-supporting, Christian-practicing, Constitutional professor with a real birth certificate from Hawaii has given us. ;)

eagleye13 Loc: Fl

How are you going to handle Trump's reelection, straightUp?

PeterS

Often a point is won irrespective of whether the reader understands or concedes.

In the 20-plus years of writing and responding on message boards I don't think I have ever had a conservative concede to a point I ever made. That doesn't mean the point wasn't spot on; that only means that in the LaLa land where conservatives live, they can't be reached by human reason. It started with Rush Limbaugh and daytime talk radio with conservatives hanging on every hate-filled fallacy he ever spewed; then came Fox and Opinion News with the likes of Hannity and others spewing more fallacies and outright lies.

And while you cons were never well-educated (though a few of you are) or deep thinkers this led to the universe where alternate facts (logical fallacies. Thank you Kelly Ann) are true. So Conservatives construct a world where there is truth some partial truth but mostly complete and total lies that can't be penetrated by reason. This means that Trump can spew any lie and Fox will drum it into their listener's heads turning them into Zombies. This is also the reason Fox was sued for 1.4 Billion dollars and was fortunate to settle out of court for half that.

Now with fewer words for conservative understanding: fallacies are good and accepted as Truth making their universe totally out of reach for someone using reason. Understand?

Parky60 Loc: People's Republic of Illinois

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. Hans Hofmann

That definitely ain't you dude.

eagleye13 Loc: Fl

"I suspect that in the meantime Trump was working with advisors to make his returns look more charitable." - straightUp

You suspect!?
LOL

federally indicted mattoid

Me too.

And thanks for taking on the fruitcake big kahuna (my pet name for him is manini weenie) point by crazy point.

He's been presenting ridiculous propaganda for so long, no one wants to engage with him. So thank you again.

eagleye13 Loc: Fl

Your mentor?

https://static.onepoliticalplaza.com/upload/2018/5/10/48785-bmf20.jpg

Parky60 Loc: People's Republic of Illinois

The only reason that you're thankful is because your lame ass can't best him slick.

eagleye13 Loc: Fl

"The only reason that you're thankful is because your lame ass can't best him slick." - Parky60

Yep.
Dim is as Dim writes.

federally indicted mattoid

If you haven't been brainwashed, you understand.