However you "spin" it, casting a $916M NOL as "good" is still "lipstick on a pig"

[320 Years of History]

There's a unavoidable fact about net operating losses that for some reason some folks seem keen to overlook:

Businesses with a need for a cash infusion may be able to obtain one quickly as a result of a tax refund from recently expanded net operating loss (NOL) carryback allowances. These provisions address the fact that, although a net loss may appear in only one tax year, it represents weaknesses that may have arisen over years in which their effect was temporarily masked by favorable income opportunities.
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For all else that one may infer about the scant information we have regarding Donald Trump's NOL, there is one fact that is so no matter what else may also be so: the existence of an NOL is a reflection of business management weaknesses of some sort. It is a reflection of a very bad business decision one made.

The size of the NOL merely indicates the magnitude of the badness of the decision(s) one made, be they made all in one year or over the course of several years. In Trump's case, whatever decision it was, was so bad that it may have endured for nearly 20 years, that is, it was so bad that it took nearly 20 years to recover from it. That is the substance of what it means to carry forward a net operating loss.

It is the underlying weaknesses in Trump's decision making that I'm focused on, and the reason I'm focused on it is because a major share of Donald Trump's raison d'etre for being a viable Presidential candidate is his business acumen. What his NOL shows without question is $916M worth of a lack of business acumen.

God bless 'em for trying....but everything nice -- all the positive and exculpating "spin" folks are putting on the fact that Trump had a NOL of $916M -- that everyone has been offering comes down to one thing and one thing only. It's their best effort to "put lipstick on a pig."

 

[boedicca]

Here's a bigger pig with lipstick, which at the time owned parts of NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. But as they are Prog mouth organs, you loons don't care.

GE claims $3.2B tax benefit while reporting $5.1B of profits in U.S.:


General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010.

The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion....

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html

 

[boedicca]

I'll also note that you are completely knowledge-free of business and tax accounting.

 

[edthecynic]

What I find interesting is The genius Trump managed to LOSE a billion dollars during the boom years of the 1990s!!!!!!
It definitely takes "genius" to lose that much money in the 1990s