Have you ever watched a horror movie with your hands over your eyes, unable to look because what’s on the screen is too scary?

That’s exactly how I feel watching the rollout of Trump’s December 2017 tax cuts. His new, diabolically creative, proposed tax giveaway is set to benefit the super wealthy, with special focus on real estate tycoons such as himself.
New York, and other mostly blue states, financed a sizable chunk of the GOP December 2017 tax plan, when they did away with deducting state and local income taxes from federal taxes.

However, cushy tax breaks with specific benefits for real estate moguls, like our president, remain untouched. Some of these include:

Carried Interest – Carried interest enables general partners in private equity and hedge funds, such as Trump and his extended family, who syndicate real estate deals with investors, to share in profits at the much lower long-term capital gains tax rate.

If carried interest gains were taxed as ordinary income, as they should be because the general partners portion of the profits are just managed capital, about $20 billion more in annual tax revenue would be raised.

1031 Exchanges (Like-Kind Exchange) – This welfare for the rich handout enables real estate investors to delay taxes on a sale of a property if they roll the proceeds of a sale into another property, of equal or greater value, within six months.

Upon death, our president, and any other real estate investor, passes this real estate to their estate, tax-free.

This costs the federal government a little over $4 billion a year in revenue. It isn’t well known that all other like-kind exchanges were eliminated in the Trump 2017 tax plan, except real estate. I wonder why?

Interest Deduction 30 Percent Cap – Business interest deductions are capped at 30 percent of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, except for real estate. This loophole specifically exempted real estate investors when the new tax plan was passed.

The aforementioned list is just a brief summary of the handouts specifically carved out, or left in the tax code, to benefit all real estate investors, such as our president.
The granddaddy tax break of them all was just proposed last week by the Trump administration.

It’s a plan to grant a $100 billion tax cut, of which 97 percent of the gains will go to the top 10 percent of the wealthiest Americans.

The proposal indexes all investments to inflation. For example, if our President invested $100 million in 1980 in anything, and took into account inflation, profits wouldn’t be taxed until a sale price above $321 million. This is literally insane!
Instead of giving an additional $100 billion annually to the rich, how about spending $100 billion to lower the price of prescription medication or health care for the bottom 90 percent of Americans?

Maybe Trump should consider injecting these same funds into Social Security, Medicare or Disability, to make sure they remain solvent for decades to come.
With all this greedy welfare geared towards the president and his super wealthy family, nobody seemed to blink when it was announced that this year’s deficit will approach $1 trillion, and corporate tax payments are close to a 75-year low.

Aren’t tax cuts supposed to raise more revenue from stimulating the economy? It certainly doesn’t seem that way.
Are you winning yet?

Probably not. But Donald Trump and his family are, thanks to the multitude of real estate specific tax breaks that come at the average taxpayer’s expense.