Why I Still Talk to Jesus -- In Spite of Everything
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“[Trump’s] whole MO is to exploit the government for everything he could get,” said Jerilyn Perine, the city housing commissioner during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. Trump “started” his business with millions from his dad. Then he expanded it on the backs of the working taxpayers of New York. Turns out Trump is the biggest welfare queen of all time.
The New York Times — A Trump Empire Built on Inside Connections and $885 Million in Tax Breaks — has just blown Trump’s claims of being a self-made “business man” out of the water. What he really is is America’s number one pleader for government help.
Trump’s been using his version of food stamps (when not shutting out black would be renters) to buy gold faucets and new wives on the backs of taxpayers.
After the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Trump even ripped off that situation: According to the Times, he sucker-punched the victims and lined up a $150,000 grant for one of his buildings near ground zero, taking advantage of a program to help small businesses in the area recover, even though he had acknowledged on the day of the attacks that his building was undamaged.
Trump is a con artist. His lies while shaving dollars off the system are part of a long pattern of ripping off the system he says he’ll save.
“Donald Trump is probably worse than any other developer in his relentless pursuit of every single dime of taxpayer subsidies he can get his paws on,” said Alicia Glen, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development, who first battled Mr. Trump when she worked in Mr. Giuliani’s administration.
As the Times dryly notes: “The level of subsidies Trump has received is at odds with his rhetoric as an outsider candidate who boasts of his single-handed success and who has denounced what he calls the pay-to-play culture of politics and a ‘rigged’ system of government.” According to the Times:
The way Donald J. Trump tells it, his first solo project as a real estate developer, the conversion of a faded railroad hotel on 42nd Street into the sleek, 30-story Grand Hyatt, was a triumph from the very beginning.
The hotel, Mr. Trump bragged in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best seller, “was a hit from the first day. Gross operating profits now exceed $30 million a year.”
But that book, and numerous interviews over the years, make little mention of a crucial factor in getting the hotel built: an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980.
The project set the pattern for Mr. Trump’s New York career: He used his father’s, and, later, his own, extensive political connections, and relied on a huge amount of assistance from the government and taxpayers in the form of tax breaks, grants and incentives to benefit the 15 buildings at the core of his Manhattan real estate empire.
Since then, Mr. Trump has reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings in New York, according to city tax, housing and finance records. The subsidies helped him lower his own costs and sell apartments at higher prices because of their reduced taxes….READ THE REST HERE.
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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace
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Please read about my journey through then out of the religious right and Republican Party.
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