Trump Pro-Murder?

In a telephone interview on "Face the Nation" in August, 2015

'The hedge fund guys didn't build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,' Trump said.

'They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them - they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It's ridiculous, ok?'

Trump's comments were referring to the so-called 'carried interest loophole' - a provision in the tax code which allows private equity and hedge fund managers pay taxes at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary income rate.

Many fund managers are in the top income bracket, but the capital gains tax bracket is only 20 percent.

While these individuals are also required to pay an additional 3.8 percent surtax on their net investment income, this total rate is still far lower than the 39.6 percent rate that top wage earners must pay on their ordinary income.

'Some of them are friends of mine. Some of them, I couldn't care less about,' Trump said.

'It is the wrong thing. These guys are getting away with murder. I want to lower the rates for the middle class.'

A few days later, he would confirm his position, telling John Heileman and Mark Halperin "I would take carried interest out."





It appears Donald J. Trump is in favor of letting murders get away. "These guys are getting away with murder," he told Heileman and Halperin. Yet, in the Corporate Tax Scam of 2017 which the President has pledged to sign

Another missing item: President Trump’s promise to get rid of the carried interest loophole. “Carried interest was unfair, and it’s gone,” Trump said last spring.

But that odious tax break isn’t gone. It’s just been tweaked a little.

Under current law, when managers of private equity funds, venture capital funds and hedge funds reap a share of their investors’ profits, they pay taxes at the low rate that applies to capital gains, not the higher rate that applies to ordinary income.

Under the new law, the fund managers still get that break, as long as they hold the underlying investment for at least three years. Tax experts say most of the managers who claim the loophole won’t find that to be a problem.

Generously, Trump could be given a break. He actually said carried interest was unfair, and "it's gone" is spoken of in the present, rather than the future, tense.

On second thought, he's a flat-out lying weasel.




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