But He Won't Let Us See His Taxes, Naturally

So, you've heard about Trump University, right? Another fine product in the Trump empire, just like his high-quality steaks and classy bottled water. Well, it was basically a huge fraud ALLEGEDLY, just like his steaks and bottled water.

And I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that, while it was still in operation, one of Trump's hand-picked financial experts gave a cool seminar on how to avoid paying taxes using real estate loopholes.

Now, there are lots of people across the nation who aren't wealthy, and who don't even know how to take advantage of the tax benefits for which they qualify. There's absolutely nothing wrong with people making use of whatever tax breaks they can get—and, frankly, there is a great need for making information freely available to working people on how to navigate our complicated tax code, so that they aren’t paying more than their fair share.

But this is not what we're talking about here. In this case, an obscenely wealthy businessman, who made an enormous amount of money exploiting real estate loopholes, charged people money to have "the loopholes queen" tell them how they can follow his lead—the implication being, though never explicitly stated, that wealth in the realm of Donald's could follow.

The catch, of course, is that Donald started out with enormous wealth. This wasn't helpful advice being offered to the Average Jane and Joe out of the goodness of Donald's heart, but a sinister hoodwinking that charged people to get "tools" that only work for people who already have money to invest—and to pay real financial professionals who offer this advice as part of their job.

Far from being a useful recommendation for average working people, exploiting real estate tax loopholes is bad for the economy to which our fates are tied...

I've got more at BNR, so head on over to read the rest.

One of the more interesting things to me about all this is how Trump was happy to charge people money to share with them this great information about tax loopholes he's proud to have exploited, but doesn't want to release his taxes so we can see that he was so successful at it he's (presumably) got a tax rate of zero. Huh.