Ivanka Trump, perhaps the one person as unqualified as Donald Trump to be in the White House, got an assist from her Fox Friends in shilling for the tax bill without having to mention that she and her family will be some of its biggest beneficiaries.
Media Matters explains just how much Trump stands to benefit:
In addition to benefiting from the corporate tax cut, which will likely lower taxes for Ivanka’s clothing company, Trump and [husband Jared] Kushner will benefit from a provision that particularly impacts those working in commercial real estate, where both President Donald Trump and Kushner have built their careers. The Republican bill lowers taxes on “pass-through income,” or money earned through partnerships or groups that is then passed on to the owner and taxed at the individual tax rate. As The New York Times reported, Kushner stands to benefit dramatically from this cut because he owns properties through “limited liability companies [LLCs] and other similar vehicles.” Over the weekend, as lawmakers clambered to gain necessary support for the bill, a last minute provision was added that could further benefit Kushner and Trump by allowing companies with no employees to deduct a percentage of their pass-through income (both Kushner and Trump have LLCs that could qualify).
In addition to likely increases in Ivanka’s and Kushner’s business earnings, both stand to gain from changes to the estate tax, which is a tax on the transfer of wealth from a deceased person. Members of extremely rich families, like Ivanka and Kushner, stand to benefit from the bill’s doubling of the amount of money that super-rich families can pass along tax-free.
Furthermore, all those goodies for Ivanka and her family come at the expense of most of the rest of us.
Yet while Fox is endlessly eager to expose any hint of a secret motive in the FBI and Justice Department, not one of the three cohosts seemed to care about Ivanka’s duplicity as she postured as someone acting on behalf of “the American people.”
TRUMP: We're going to deliver historic tax reforms, and it's going to happen before Christmas. It’s going to be the fulfillment of an enormous campaign promise, and something that's just tremendously important for the American people. We feel it. This is something the people of this country want. They want simplification. They want a tax code that they can understand. They want lower corporate taxes and understand the benefit if the companies they work for can invest in their workforces, invest in new equipment, and ultimately lead to wage growth. And I think what we've done on the individual side by doubling the standard deduction, by doubling the child tax credit and increasing refundability to $2,000 a child. By creating a dependent care tax credit for those in -- for those many Americans who take care of adult dependents who aren't children, who are above the age of 18, but who are still dependent on them.
FACT CHECK: This is a load of hooey only her father could love. And his Fox Friends. This bill falls far short of his campaign promises, according to Forbes. And it is historically unpopular. But hey, maybe by “the American people” Trump means her kind of people.
Cohost Steve Doocy seemed to think so. He helped Trump attack Democrats for not going along with this get-richer-quick scheme:
DOOCY: There are so many people this benefits. You would think that there would be some Democrats who would say you know what? I'm for tax cuts for the middle class. I'm for helping small businesses. Why aren't there any Democrats?
TRUMP: One would think that and there are a lot of Democrats and they're all across this country. So the voters --
DOOCY: But what about the ones in the Senate?
TRUMP: Well, we've had a lot of very productive conversations with Democrats who I believe are intellectually there. Their hearts are there but the party is not there and the leadership's not there.
BRIAN KILMEADE: Leadership's not letting them.
TRUMP: And that is unfortunate. But I'm hopeful with this really enormous and historic win for the American people, we come into 2018 with such tremendous momentum that we galvanize support and cohesion -- not only within the party because I think one of the amazing things is how the party has come together, worked together to accomplish with what they know the American people want.
Watch Ivanka prove she’s a chip off the old Lying-Trump block below, from the December 18, 2017 Fox & Friends.
You sad sack middle class Republicans are still clinging to the giant con your controllers have been playing you with for nigh on 40 years. ‘The old trickle-down theory trick’ as Maxwell Smarter-than-you-lot would have it.
Put money (purchasing power) into the hands of the working and middle classes and they will spend it, creating a bouyant environment for responsive American businesses both large and small. Everyone is better off and the economy flourishes. Put that same money into the hands of the rich, and heaven only knows what they’ll do with it – take more expensive international vacations, buy Parisian fashions, Italian shoes, European sports cars and multi-million dollar yachts… and maybe find a nice offshore tax haven to hide their wealth away from the taxman’s prying eyes.
The thing about business entrepreneurs, the ridiculously mislabelled ‘job creators’ is that they don’t even consider starting or expanding a business unless they sense an opportunity. Seriously, who would do it unless they saw themselves making a profit? And if they see more profit from it, most have no hesitation in setting up shop in 3rd World countries – cheap labour, fewer pesky safety regulations, and easy-peasy local officials to bribe. Just ask Donald and Ivanka.
The money involved in setting up a business is a side-issue – as long as they’re not serial defaulters like Trump, they almost invariably borrow the funds required, exposing their personal wealth as little as possible in case the business fails. In this era of low interest rates, it makes even more sense to borrow.