Trump Committed...Good Tax Planning.  Steven Moskowitz talks to Armstrong & Getty - podcast episode cover

Trump Committed...Good Tax Planning. Steven Moskowitz talks to Armstrong & Getty

May 08, 201911 min
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Episode description

Turns out, private citizen Trump was guilty of...using good tax planning back in the 80's & 90's.
Helping us understand the depths of depravity on display within this current anti-Trump news cycle, we turned to tax attorney Steven Moskowitz to explain how Trump used existing tax laws to help his businesses.

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Transcript

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The Times before Donald Trump lost more money than nearly any other individual US tax theyer from the total loss is more than one billion dollars, and that's just the beginning of it, according to The Times. Okay, so this is running revelations. This is why I'm not part of the sevent of Americans that think it ought to be a law that candidates have to reveal the taxes because

it's so poorly handled by the media. When Trump was a candidate and some tax stuff came out about how he wrote off all these losses, and everybody went crazy. I remember, it was shocking. Nobody said he did anything illegal, and and nobody in Congress said we should change the law. Yet the tone was, look at this awful thing that happened, but obviously you don't think it's too awful. Hillary Clinton didn't say change the law because she's gonna do the

same thing when she's running a business. I'm not hearing you to understand the depths of depravity of what we've learned. We've invited our favorite tax expert, Stephen Moscowitz at tax attorney from Moscowitz LLLP, to join us on the show to discuss so what has been revealed. Stephen, thank you for the time. First of all, how are you? Um? Great? I'm actually happy because I get to talk about taxes. You are the most enthusiastic person in any field I've

ever known, and I've known pro athletes and musicians. So so, Stephen, what is your reaction to what's been revealed about the Donald's taxes in the eighties and nineties. Good job for Donald's tax attorneys. My entire career, which spans over thirty years. This is typical real estate investing. What you have is a positive cash flow. So suppose you took in rental

of three million from your building. You wrote checks of expenses of two million, you have a cash profit of a million, but then you have depreciation of five million, so you have a paper loss a tax laws, and then you can write that off against four million of your other income and not pay tax on that. That's what our Congress, in their infinite wisdom, have provided us. It's always been around. And to see how favorite is this most recent tax act? The government has allowed more

of that. They've increased bonus deppreciation from fifty to a hundred percent for our properties that have a useful life of twenty years or less. That means that Donald could have done more losses with the new law than the old one. It's favored by Congress. They give it to us. So what percentage of these monsters take these so called deductions? Stephen? Everybody that has real estate takes it? One? Can I use a word that gets your bleeper ready? Because this

might be an offensive word? Are you ready? I can't wait. It's a valid here it comes tax shelter. I said, the dirty word. But so is your mortgage interest, so is your charitable deductions. This is Congress saying, look, they'd like you to do certain behaviors. They like you buying rental buildings, they like you doing charitable They can't order you. We're still a democracy. So the Congress says, okay, they'll pay part of the freight by giving you tax deductions.

So that's how the Congress gets us to do things. There's two purposes of the tax law. One we all know extraction of money from us. But the other one is a system of incentives. When the government wants you to do something, can't order it, says luck, we'll pay part of it through tax savings. This is what our

tax law is all about. And again, as you were saying earlier, nobody says if he didn't, even when he's been criticized for taking the advantage of what our Congress, in their infinite wisdom, has provided, if anybody didn't do that, save the nuts. So I'll ask you this, not knowing what you're gonna say. If this is gonna be uh something that MacDonald look better or worse? How much of an indication, um that the stuff that's come out is it of to whether you're a good business person or

a bad business person. There's a bigger the tax laws you can take Earlier, the better. For example, there's something called cost segregation analysis, where a rental building, a commercial building is depreciated for thirty nine years, a commercial building a residential building twenty seven and a half years. But with cost segregation analysis, you sent an engineer into the property and he or she says, okay, you have some thirty nine year property, but some fifteen, some ten, some five,

and you greatly accelerate the appreciation. It's called time value of money. You'd rather have a benefit today than thirty nine years from today. And then if you continue to buy or build buildings, you can do this over the years. And that's how you can do this for years and years, use it as part of your financing for the buildings and save money. So the more you can do, the better. We do this for clients. It's perfectly legal. And is this a loophole or is Congress perfectly aware of how

the law is used. Well, of course they're perfectly rare. And again this year in our most recent tax law, Congress increase to depreciation. So now if the Donald had the same transactions today, he could have written off even more than he did in those earlier years. The Congress not only favors it. They gave us more in our

most recent tax law. Steve Muskwitz tax Attorneys online. So the way math works, if you cut taxes one percent for everybody, a politician can claim most of the benefits went to the rich, because one percent of a billion dollars is more than one percent of dollars a year. Similarly, um, they're talking about Trump lost more money than most people. Is that just because he's dealing with bigger numbers, he's he's a bigger player. Well, of course, and and again

we're talking about paper losses. Suppose you bought a giant building it was very expensive, you would have massive depreciation on that, as opposed to say you bought a residential house. But the bottom line is what he's done is just bigger numbers. But the idea of business, of course, is to make the maximum amount of money and pay them their amount of taxes. And look at the fortune five dred with all those companies that make billions in profit

and pay zero taxes. So when you hear the reporting on the stuff in the mainstream media doesn't make you just want to tear your hair out or do you just ignore it? It makes me crazy because you have people that don't understand things, like this certain politician who was instrumental in keeping Amazon out of New York City saying, well, good, you know we keep them out. We'll wait a minute. The reason fit in New York gave those incentives was

to bring twenty five thousand jobs. The ripple effect. Those people make money, pay taxes, spend money, new businesses open, they have taxes. That's basic economics, and that's why the Congress does this because they want economic prosperity for everyone. When somebody invest in a building like that, there's a lot of people other than the owner of the building

that benefits. Steven Moscow, it's tax attorney Moscow. It's l l P. If you need to get a hold of him, he's at one triple a tax deal, one tax deal. Hey Steven, it's always enlightening. Thanks a million, guys, Thanks so much. I have a great time. Good to talk to you. So this is a credit to Stephen, not us. So how that we chose to have him on, But tell me you heard a better discussion of Trump's taxes than mat since they came out last night. He didn't make fun of him once you can if you'd like.

But my point is if you don't like it, and you you can decide you don't like that, but then argue to change the law. Whoever's criticizing this, there is not a single allegation of illegality or as far as I can tell, unethical behavior in any of this. Now, again, I don't think Trump's a saying. He has some business practices I think are way out about absolutely absolutely, but

this ain't one of them. So and I tell you what, New York Times is working as hard as they can with the WAPO and and CNN and MSNBC and the A C l U to get Trump reelected. I still yeah, I still say, just my guests, it's a net positive for Trump this story in that it will motivate people. Trump supporters are gonna vote for anyway. Trump paters are gonna vote against him. But that the crowd in there, that's like, I don't know, I'm happy with some stuff, but the kind of guy is drives me crazy. These

stories make that crowd want to vote for Trump. It's like, what are you doing? Now? What is this? This has nothing to do with Russia anything? Now is this? And and it has absolutely nothing to do with me and my family and our safety and our ability to make a living and the rest of it. Anyway, we'll see how it turns out. We only have Can you put the other screen up there, Hanson away. We're getting close to the election. We're down to the final crucial days.

The big five forty five they call him. I'll tell you what though, this the coverage of it in the WAPPO includes the Donald and his wife Ivana at the time in the eighties. I think, yeah, getting aboard their yacht and she's got the big poofy eighties hair going, and uh it finally dawned. He's got the big poofy eighties hair too, but he kept it. He still rocks it. The big hair sprayed hair, well, the big hair for the women come back, like my all my early girlfriends.

Absolutely everything comes back, question of time. I would have never thought high waisted jeans would come back. And I see I live in a college nown I see college girls were in them all the time. I think, why why don you there at this time? Big hair will come back though, Oh yeah, where you spend like half an hour with a full can of hair spray to make it just giant Oh, you tease it up, you blow it dry and empty the can on it. It's enormous hair halo exactly, I'd like a helmet boy. The

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