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posted by martyb on Monday December 05 2016, @05:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the perfectly-legal-loopholes dept.

Drew Harwell over at the Washington Post has an interesting story about a tax loophole that could allow Trump appointees to avoid paying millions in taxes.

President-elect Donald Trump's ultra-wealthy Cabinet nominees will be able to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes in the coming weeks when they sell some of their holdings to avoid conflicts of interest in their new positions.

The tax advantage will allow Trump officials, forced by ethics laws to sell certain assets, to defer the weighty tax bills they would otherwise owe on the profits from selling stock and other holdings.

The benefit is one of the more subtle ways that the millionaires and billionaires of Trump's White House, which already will be the wealthiest administration in modern American history, could benefit financially from their transition into the nation's halls of power.

The legal tax maneuver, offered for years to executive-branch appointees and employees, was designed to help ease the sting of being forced to suddenly sell investments.

But the federal program, encoded in Section 2634 of federal ethics laws and known as a "certificate of divestiture," has never been tested quite like this. Trump's Cabinet picks have amassed assets worth billions of dollars from lifetimes in banking and investing, much of which they will be able to sell tax-free.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @06:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @06:53AM (#437083)

    Stop it with this "oh yeah, well what about blah blah blah".

    No one cares.

    Whats important here is Trump got elected on the basis of stopping exactly this sort of thing.

    He was going to drain the swamp, remember? Not THROW MORE SWAMP IN!

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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @07:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @07:02AM (#437086)

    In case you've been living under a rock, you might have noticed Trump hasn't even taken office yet.

    A bit hard to drain the swap when you haven't even been there.

    While his appointments haven't filled me with everlasting joy, it has really been no better or worse than any other administration that i can tell.

    And unless you share your crystal ball, I'd prefer not to make any judgements on what might happen just yet.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @10:54AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @10:54AM (#437120)

      Wondering what form this draining of the swamp may take. All the same idiots are in Congress. Honestly not sure what to expect either. A lot of us didn't like him in spite of how charismatic he is just because he didn't have any concrete goals and couldn't quite articulate what a drained swamp would look like.

      But ultimately you're right. I wish the media would stop hyperventilating already. What's done is done. He was the "we need to elect him to see what's in his platform" candidate. Seeing how well that worked with the ACA, it doesn't leave me with a lot of hope. I'm thinking in 3 years or so there's going to be a lot of interesting points to be made comparing posts from now with what actually happens.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 05 2016, @02:32PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday December 05 2016, @02:32PM (#437153) Journal

      I agree with you to an extent, but I would caution everyone to not surrender to the temptation of double-standards and apologia. We can't afford it. Instead of arguing about whether we ought to hold a Republican-controlled government to an exacting standard versus holding a Democrat-controlled government to an exacting standard, let's hold government to an exacting standard, period. If we can do that dispassionately, even better.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday December 05 2016, @12:33PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday December 05 2016, @12:33PM (#437130) Journal
    Really? Because I remember Trump, during his campaign, saying that you'd have to be an idiot not to do everything in your power to avoid paying taxes. He didn't seem concerned that tax avoidance is much easier for the likes of him with large amounts of money than for the majority of the population.
    --
    sudo mod me up
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:25PM (#437150)

      What got Trump elected was that he was willing to be on all sides of every issue so voters could pick and choose the version of Trump they wanted to vote for.

      He didn't actually expect to get elected so promising everyone what they wanted in the ultimate caricature of a politician had no downside.

      But now he's being held to account for his words, and that means practically everything he does will make him a hypocrite.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 05 2016, @02:41PM (#437157)

    HE HAS DONE NOTHING, this is a fucking speculative article. The word "Could" is a dead give away. What a waste of my time even reading this line. This is classic left-wing bull-shit "journalism." I "could" rob a bank, and I "could" set a hobo on fire. Come back to me with facts assholes.