Another provision, which wasn’t in the House or Senate bills, allows real-estate developers who own buildings through L.L.C.s, as Trump does, to deduct twenty per cent of the income that these properties generate. To qualify for the break, the properties have to be newish ones that haven’t been fully depreciated. “This helps people who have held property for a while, like Donald Trump,” David Kamin, a law professor at New York University, told David Sirota and Josh Keefe, of the International Business Times.
Another beneficiary of this provision may well be Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who is also a real-estate investor. Corker had been the only Republican to vote against the Senate version of the tax bill, but on Friday he announced that he’d changed his mind, and that “after great thought and consideration, I believe this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make U.S. businesses domestically more productive and internationally more competitive is one we should not miss.” Corker didn’t mention his personal interests, but Sirota and Keefe did. “Federal records reviewed by IBT show that Corker has millions of dollars of ownership stakes in real-estate-related LLCs that could also benefit” from the final bill, they reported.
In other words, Senator Corker’s support was bought with a provision that would dramatically lower his personal tax bill. A bribe by any other name would taste as bitter. The story can be found here but it may be behind a paywall– or you may get a discount offer for a dollar week– well worth it for the mass of online news, reviews, fiction, and other content online as well as those priceless cover illustrations, the latest of which portrays Don the Con as the infamous Scrooge by Charles Dickens.
Another beneficiary of this provision may well be Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who is also a real-estate investor. Corker had been the only Republican to vote against the Senate version of the tax bill, but on Friday he announced that he’d changed his mind, and that “after great thought and consideration, I believe this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make U.S. businesses domestically more productive and internationally more competitive is one we should not miss.” Corker didn’t mention his personal interests, but Sirota and Keefe did. “Federal records reviewed by IBT show that Corker has millions of dollars of ownership stakes in real-estate-related LLCs that could also benefit” from the final bill, they reported.
In other words, Senator Corker’s support was bought with a provision that would dramatically lower his personal tax bill. A bribe by any other name would taste as bitter. The story can be found here but it may be behind a paywall– or you may get a discount offer for a dollar week– well worth it for the mass of online news, reviews, fiction, and other content online as well as those priceless cover illustrations, the latest of which portrays Don the Con as the infamous Scrooge by Charles Dickens.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 