Friday, November 18, 2016

Trump Force One - Business Deduction

Donald Trump is self-employed.  Which means his lifestyle is largely a business write-off.  For example his plane, Trump Force One is a business write-off.  He just makes sure everything he does with the jet relates to business.  He's a busy man, so that is easy.  He loves his work, and his work is his life, but then that is true of anyone authentically self-employed.


Trump is not breaking any rules, nor is this extravagance some moral lapse.  Keep in mind how many high-salaried people all this extravagance keeps employed. Not just anyone can clean gold plating.  Also, with people from all over the world in his jet, the gold plating is sensible since gold is anti-bacterial (it is why we use it in teeth fillings, and as money.)

First the laws are written for a purpose:  to get people to run their own businesses.  The Hegemon knows new and small business is where the job growth comes from.  And new tax sources, since the Hegemon prefers to allow at least some innovation and competition to expand the base (in an intellectual property regime, innovation and competition is largely constrained, USA only has to be a but freer than the other places).

Of course, once you make money, they want it all, as Reagan quipped:  If it moves tax it, if it keeps moving regulate it, if it stops moving subsidize it.  Republicans do this to business, democrats do this to people.

If I was Trump, assuming he wins the electoral college vote, I sell everything off by the time I was sworn in, and donate the proceeds to charity.  Enter office with nothing.  (Tell the kids to go find work, but don't embarrass me). Serve the 4-8 years as President, and then come out and start over.  Of course he'd be a billonaire again in a month, but so what, it would not matter.  He'd pull down a million a week in speaker fees.    His lifestyle would still be fabulous and a write-off.

I expect Trump's retirement plan is the same as mine: grab my chest and drop dead mid-sentence at a trade show (in Hong Kong.)  Tag 'im and drag 'im.

But my lifestyle is not so fabulous (fabulous enough for me, sed de gustibus non disputandem est.)  No private planes for me.  Too much of the Icarus idea, cautionary tales of success and extravagance.  That the Dakin family disappeared on a test flight-Christmas vacation is still recalled in the industry.  The lawsuits cite many other crashes.

Trump will change nothing, the ex nihilo credit regime is over.  He'll just preside over the assigning of the costs of the damage done during the boom years.  Hillary would have been obliged to do the same thing.

You can wail and cry about your assets, those tallied in ex nihilo credit, disappearing, or being stolen, or whatever, but they were never there to begin with, nothing from nothing is nothing.  "But I worked for it...!"  You worked for nothing.  Literally.

Or you can be self-employed, and build a business into the vacuum being created by the destruction of the dinosaur ex nihilo credit regime.

There may be no jobs, but there sure is a lot of work to be done, money to be made.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

"He loves his work,"

This is so important as an entrepreneur which many people don't get. Whatever business or trade that you are in, you will most likely have competition who is in it for more than just the money. You do not want to compete with someone like this - you want to be that person in whichever field that you're in. If you love what you do, you are less likely to cut corners or just give up easily, and you will greatly increase your probability of success.