TRUMP FAMILY CONFIRMS A STATEMENT FROM THE 1800’s.

…Honore’ de Balzac

Is Trump proving that behind every great fortune there is a crime?

There was a famous French writer in the early 1800’s, Honoré de Balzac, who wrote about how the world back then actually operated as he said: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

Apparently, the Trump family may be proving this a true statement for today.  At least, that certainly seems to be true of President Trump’s fortune, sneaked to him by his father, Fred, with accounting sleights of hand designed to fool the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and everyone else.

The New York Times has published more than 13,000 words detailing how the Trumps hid their wealth from tax authorities and passed more than $1 billion from one generation to the next, and in doing so they avoided about $500 million in taxes. Donald Trump received more than his fair share from his dad.  By the age of 3, this precocious child was earning $200,000 a year.

The Trumps’ financial situation was both ingenious and ordinary, and as The Times said, it was “legally dubious” and amounting to “outright fraud.” The latter category consisted of ripping off the middle-class tenants in Fred Trump’s housing projects by made-up expenses that were used to justify Trump’s higher rents. 

Still, there was probably nothing in The Times’ account that surprised New York’s people of wealth, especially if their game is high-rise real estate.  Someone once said this game is considered in New York City as a three-card Monte with elevator shafts.

All rich people know that the way to stay rich is to avoid or evade taxes.  And the Trumps out-did themselves in this area, as the methods they used, for the most part, were very commonplace.

If you happened to grow up reciting all those former statistics on what a wonderful place the United States is, you now must have learned that our vaunted middle class is shrinking. The lower classes have gone into the cellar and the income disparity is increasing by leaps and bounds.  Rich Americans live 15 years longer than poor Americans, “who endure only as long as those in Sudan or Pakistan.”

So today, America is not so exceptional anymore.

The rich in America are now very, very rich. The ultra-rich Americans are even more ultra-rich.

Yet, with all this wealth, it has had “zero impact on the average pay of 117 million Americans”.  Since 1980, the income of the top 1% of Americans has more than tripled. In that same period, the income of the bottom 50% has remained exactly the same. As for the top 0.001%, their income has increased by seven-fold.

The reality is that, it is still true that a rising tide lifts all boats, but it those in the super-yachts get raised the highest.

So, what brought about all this change on in the first place?

Well it’s not just one thing, it’s many things.  The main one is the reluctance of the US Congress, and the government in general, to deal with income disparity.  The new GOP tax law was mislabeled by Republicans as a “reform”.  In fact, all it did was lower the tax rate for the richest of Americans and it gave corporations a windfall without ensuring that they pass on a bit of it to their workers.  Disgusting.

Remember back when President Ronald Reagan asserted that in his first inaugural address, he stated that “government is the problem”.  Then the Republican Party began to endeavored to make things worse… and guess what, they succeeded.

The middle class has suffered mightily from the GOP’s electoral success. The former “American Dream” is now mainly a fantasy. Today the poor stay poor, but they will soon have some company tumbling down their way. That’s because the floor under the middle class is failing.

One thing about Donald Trump is that he was totally honest about his dishonesty regarding taxes.  During his presidential campaign, he boasted that only fools pay their fair share of taxes. He made tax evasion a real virtue.  This is just another way of saying he feels he owes nothing to nobody.  It is the way many rich people feel. Their call to spread the wealth is limited only to various wealthy family foundations.

One would think today that many on the left think the remedy is Socialism.

However, outside of the lecture hall, Socialism has worked absolutely nowhere.

The real remedy would be an American political uprising in which the current situation was denounced as, truly un-American.

Continuing the silence and non-action, as it is today, is truly a crime in America that confirms Balzac’s original statement that “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

Just look at whose running the country today.

I rest my case.

Copyright G. Ater  2018