October 14, 2018: Don't You Wish You Could Pay Taxes Like Jared Kushner!

 

10/14/18: Speaking of hypocrites, imagine you earned $1.7 million in investments and salary in one year, specifically 2015. Imagine how much fun you could have spending the $4,657.53 you earned every day. 

But, oh, the taxes! 

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Worth $324 million and paying zero federal taxes.

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Well, not if you had a sharp tax lawyer, like Jared Kushner, son-in-law of “I-Can’t-Show-You-My-Taxes” Donald J. Trump. 

You claim “depreciation” on real estate you own – and, presto, you don’t pay a dime in federal taxes, despite that hefty income mentioned above. 

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump don't pay taxes like regular folk.

So: this is how it works. Jared is worth an estimated $324 million. In five of the last eight years, records now in the possession of The New York Times indicate he managed to pay no federal income taxes – and do it legally. How? Because fat cats donate to lawmakers, who write tax codes friendly to fat cats, who then donate gratefully once again to fat-cat-friendly lawmakers. 

(Is that what Team Trump means by “drain the swamp?”) 

There is a very real possibility (but the records are incomplete) that Kushner has paid almost no taxes in the last decade. When asked to comment, no one from his camp wanted to grab the mic.

 

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TRUMP SITS DOWN with a real journalist, Leslie Stahl, for a change, and takes a few hard questions, not the usual “grooved pitches” served up by Fox News. 

 

“I think I know more about it than he does.” 

Stahl wants to know what he thinks of Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a man the president once described as “one of the most effective generals we’ve had in many, many decades.” 

Is his job safe? 

Trump hedges. “I think he’s kind of a Democrat, if you want to know the truth.” He might leave the administration. He might not. Trump doesn’t know. As always, he claims he has a “very good relationship” with Mattis. 

The two have clashed in the past, on NATO, for example, which Trump has been quick to bash. Was it true, then, Stahl wondered, that Mattis had to explain that NATO existed to keep us out of World War III? 

“No, it’s not true,” Trump replied. “Frankly, I like General Mattis. I think I know more about it than he does.” 

Trump has now lumped “Mad Dog” Mattis, as he once loved to call his Secretary of Defense, in with Democrats. Those are people he describes as “an angry, left-wing mob” intent on smashing the nation.

 

Among others, Mattis has clashed with National Security Advisor John Bolton, considered a war hawk, and Mira Ricardel, his top deputy. Ricardel has never spent a single day in the U.S. military. 

As for Bolton, he once explained his decision while studying at Yale, to join the U.S. Army Reserve. True, in the summer of 1970, he would have to go through 18 weeks of basic training. He would have to attend weekend sessions for six years. At no time would he have to dodge bullets. He wrote for his Yale undergraduate 25^th reunion, “I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy.” By way of excuse, he added, “I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.” 

You’d think a guy like Bolton, a leading war hawk, would have wanted to do his part when young to turn that effort round. 

But no. 

If Americans had to bleed, he preferred to leave it up to other young men too poor to attend Yale, and career Marines like Mattis, instead.