Mr. "I'm self funding" is now bragging about the campaign donations he's raised...Really?

[bripat9643]

Like commercials have been helping the Hill-Beast soooo much this election......................

RWNJ traitors always rush to change the subject and really, who can blame them?

Thank you. I was just about to, of Kidd's post, write, "You win the 'First Post That Has Nothing to Do With the Topic' award." But you effectively beat me to it. TY.

Who appointed you the topic police?

 

[toxicmedia]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

Trump has to brag.

That's his thing.

 

[Norman]

So which corporations have donated to his campaign?

People who want to see political change for the better have certainly done so... but they aren't expecting any favors. They are expecting to see Trump as the rightful president, making America great again.

 

[bripat9643]

Like commercials have been helping the Hill-Beast soooo much this election......................

I love how RWrs stay on topic so well.

I love the way douche bags think any mention of Hillary is always "off topic." So did Lester Holt.

 

[tinydancer]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

Trump's funding all comes from small donations collected on the internet. I've donated to his campaign myself.

You didn't really expect him to spend $2 billion of his own money, did you?

He's finally getting some mega donors along with all the "little guys". I should bump my thread again. It's really cute what they set up for the donation drive.

They came up with teams. Team Yuuuuuuge, Team Deplorable What's important though is one third of that 18 million was from joe and mary 6 packs. I love it. Great organization now.

Check it out

Trump raises $18 million in just 24 hours after the debate

 

[tinydancer]

Like commercials have been helping the Hill-Beast soooo much this election......................

I love how RWrs stay on topic so well.

I love the way douche bags think any mention of Hillary is always "off topic." So did Lester Holt.

And this after all the years of leveling a criticism of Obama and what's the very next liberal post?

But Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh!

 

[rdean]

Hedge Fund Money Has Vastly Favored Clinton Over Trump

Trump does not have a billionair s for Hilary club nor is he viewed favorably by big money interests. She is the poster child for crony capitalism. Nor,does,he wash money from expecting foreign donors through her foundation to fund her campaign. Who made 250,000 a pop to talk to Wall Street big wigs for 20 min?

Ahh, but who is owned by Wall Street? Someone who owes them nothing or someone who owes them millions of dollars?

 

[Onyx]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

He is broke. There is no other choice for him.

See how easily corrupt and dishonest crony capitalists like Trump will betray their values?

 

[Onyx]

Trump takes money from Wall Street and OWES Wall Street hundreds of millions of dollars.

But he's "self financed".

In my day, debt meant you were "Owned".

It was highly speculated that he was going broke even before the start of the election. I called him out for pursuing payday right from the gecko.

 

[320 Years of History]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

James Simons, establishment Democrat

Robert Mercer, anti-establishment Republican

A hedge fund house divided: Renaissance Technologies

• Renaissance Technologies to Al Franken (D) in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to Ann Kirkpatrick (D) in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to Ben Cardin (D) in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to Ben Sasse (R) in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to Charles E. Schumer (D) in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to Indiana District 3 candidates in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to New Hampshire Senate candidates in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to New York District 1 candidates in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to New York District 19 candidates in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to Hawaii Senate candidates in 2014

Renaissance Technologies to DCCC in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to DNC in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to DPC in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to DSCC in 2016

• Renaissance Technologies to NRCC in 2016

OpenSecrets.org Search

So the false narrative is debunked!

Top Donors data for Hillary Clinton, 2016 Cycle | OpenSecrets

How can Hilary attack wall Street when they are her biggest donors?

Do they know she is lying?

???

Red:
What do you imagine the "false narrative to be?"

Trump did claim to be "self funding." He has claimed that being self funding is why he's not beholden to "big money" interests. He has raised $15M from one organization. That organization is an investment management firm.

Are you asserting that an organization that donates $15M to a political campaign is not a "big money" interest?

 

[frigidweirdo]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

Perfectly consistent from a guy who has had two opinions on every issue going.

What do you think about the fence? The fence is wonderful, it's bad, everyone's got to have it, you'd be an idiot to have one....

 

[Kat]

Trump did claim to be "self funding."

For the Primary. Not the General. And he did that. Stop ignoring the facts, please.

 

[320 Years of History]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

Trump's funding all comes from small donations collected on the internet. I've donated to his campaign myself.

You didn't really expect him to spend $2 billion of his own money, did you?

Red:
You could not be more "loud, strong and wrong."

Trump's sources of funds as of September 2016:

• Individual Contributions: $74,777,877 (45%)
  • - Small Individual Contributions: $48,353,930 (29%)
  • - Large Individual Contributions: $26,599,302 (16%)
• PAC Contributions $22,200 (0%)
• Candidate self-financing $54,040,587 (33%)
• Federal Funds $0 (0%)
• Other $37,012,617 (22%)

Blue:
I have no expectations about how much of his own money he spends. I expect only that a candidate who proclaims to be self funding and who asserts that because s/he is self funding, s/he is not beholden to the "big money" interests spend whatever money they have and that it takes to try to accomplish their objective.

By way of comparison, Ross Perot spend ~$63M ($97M in inflation adjusted money) of his own money on his campaign. Perot was at the time worth $2.4 billion, according to Forbes.

I don't know how much money Trump has or what he's worth. I've heard a variety of figures tossed about, but truly, I don't care what he's worth. He made the "self funding" claims and assertions; therefore he needs to live up to them. Trump did not say, "I'll be self funding to a point." I just want to see him stick to what he initially asserted, but like practically everything else the man has said, it's not "holding water" over the long haul.

 

[320 Years of History]

Like commercials have been helping the Hill-Beast soooo much this election......................

RWNJ traitors always rush to change the subject and really, who can blame them?

Thank you. I was just about to, of Kidd's post, write, "You win the 'First Post That Has Nothing to Do With the Topic' award." But you effectively beat me to it. TY.

Who appointed you the topic police?

It's my thread, so I am self appointed.

 

[320 Years of History]

He's finally getting some mega donors along with all the "little guys". I should bump my thread again. It's really cute what they set up for the donation drive.

They came up with teams. Team Yuuuuuuge, Team Deplorable What's important though is one third of that 18 million was from joe and mary 6 packs. I love it. Great organization now.

Would you please substantiate the "one third of that 18 million was from joe and mary 6 packs" aspect of your remark? I read your linked article. I don't see anything about small sum donors. I do see that some "heavy hitters" participated in a "call in" drive Trump held.

• Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks,
• Dallas investor Ray Washburne – who used to head New Jersey governor Chris Christie's effort,
• Financier Roy Bailey

Some of the folks from teams "Yuuuuuuge":

• New York Jets owner Woody Johnson,
• private equity big Lew Eisenberg,
• Republican National Committee finance director Cara Mason

No big money interests there, eh. LOL

 

[320 Years of History]

Oh, Lord, have mercy! Fiction writers could not come up with this stuff.

Who the hell promotes the idea that they won't be beholden to "big money" interests and "Wall St." in politics and then brags about having collected more money than ever before? Trump's cause obtained $15M from one investment management firm. I guess that's not the same thing as "big monied interests." Nope, not at all. Puh-lease!

He is broke. There is no other choice for him.

See how easily corrupt and dishonest crony capitalists like Trump will betray their values?

Off Topic:
What values? Their value for making money at everyone else's expense?

 

[ScienceRocks]

Trump flip flops so effin fast that he makes Romney look steady. lol

 

[320 Years of History]

Trump did claim to be "self funding."

For the Primary. Not the General. And he did that. Stop ignoring the facts, please.

Show me where before the primaries concluded he clearly qualified his "self funding" assertion as pertaining only to the primaries. Frankly, I wouldn't lambaste him over not being self funding had he just been clear about what his thoughts were, but that's not what he was. Trump's lack of clarity and precision in pretty much everything that matters is the real problem. That lack of clarity and precision is what makes him just like every other politician, and that he is just like every other one of them is supposedly what he's most supposed to be not.

 

[320 Years of History]

The following is an excerpt from a post I wrote for a different thread some while back. It seems particularly relevant again.

"Funny Money": Loan Money to My Campaign --> Campaign Buys from My Companies
Okay, let's get into the matter of Trump's loans to his campaign. Notice that Trump loans money to his campaign rather than donating money to his campaign. What's the impact of that? Well let's take a look.

• Donations to political campaigns, one's own or anyone else's, are not tax deductible. One may as well have spent the money on a pair of shoes or groceries for the tax deductibility of a donation to a campaign. Indeed, those acts may yield a tax deduction whereas a political donation never does.
  • The impact of this is that one earns money (wages or whatever) and then spends it. One pays taxes on the money earned, the money donated is simply not in one's pocket anymore, and that's that. It's what most people are used to, and it's certainly the circumstance of nearly everyone who contributes to political campaigns.
• One may make an interest free loan to a non-profit organization, in this case one's own political campaign; however, in doing so, one must also impute interest income on the loan and include the imputed interest in one's income.
  • That interest then can be deducted as a charitable contribution since it's not actually collected from the recipient of the loan. It's not exactly "a wash" if the deduction is post-AGI, but it is "a wash" if the deduction is one taken to arrive at AGI. Whether the loan was given by an individual or a business will make the difference in this case because Trump is an individual and the campaign is not a business.
  • The above is relatively straightforward. But here's where it gets complicated and "technical," if you will. Accountants won't have trouble with this, finance types probably won't either. The average person probably hasn't any idea of this stuff, so I'll try to keep it as simple as possible.
    
    (Note: To repeat, none of this is illegal, but it is "shady" given all Trump's "soapboxing" about being self-funding, which to the layman means he's spending his money, funding his campaign, in much the same way you and I would be doing were to donate to it. Had Trump not been "on about" being self-funding, I wouldn't be bringing this up, quite frankly because it wouldn't apply.)
    
    Trump's contributions to his campaign are loans not donations. Trump will not seek repayment of the loans, which, in turn, means the loans will eventually, if they aren't already, become bad debt expense. That means that while he has to impute interest as noted above, Trump also gets to take a deduction for bad debt expense. Why? Because his "contributions" are loans not donations.
    
    Another thing to keep in mind is that Trump's businesses are all privately held. Most of them are LLCs, which means they are treated as "flow through" entities and taxes are paid by the equity partners in the organization. That basically means the accounting happens at the partnership/LLC level, and the net results (gain or loss) flow down to the partners in direct proportion to their equity participation. The other equity owners in Trump Organization, the holding corporation (not an LLC) for all Trump's businesses, are his kids.
    
    For now, just store this in the back of your mind; it's relevance will appear below shortly. Also keep in mind that LLCs/partnerships and very closely held corporations function pretty much as do sole proprietorships, that is, the owners can pretty well "run" any expenses -- down to toothpaste and toilet paper if they want to -- through the business and deduct them as business expenses, be they operating or miscellaneous. (There are myriad legit ways to do so, but it's not hard at all to do so, especially with the great variety of types of businesses Trump Organization owns. In super closely held entities like Trump's, doing so basically comes down to cash flow not actual income, which may well explain why Trump was for his campaign begging for $100K in "emergency" funding recently.)
    
    So what does all this mean?
    • Donald Trump loans money (let's just call it $100 for simplicity's sake) to the campaign (DTFP).
      • Pre-AGI tax deduction = $100 for bad debt expense
        Had you and I donated $100 to DTFP, we get no tax deduction. It's just our hard earned money that we spent.
        Now up the $100 to $55M. Quite a nice deduction for something that to everyone else isn't deductible at all, hugh? Don't forget that the $55M expenditure is one he is predisposed to making anyway just as most Americans are predisposed to spending money on their summer vacations, car maintenance, food, political campaign donation, or whatever, but those are expenditure for which they don't get a deduction for making.
    • DTFP spends $10 to buy "whatever" from XYZ Trump-owned LLC (it doesn't matter for this illustration which one).
      • XYZ records $10 in sales and some share of that flows to Trump Organization, and thereby to his family members via their ownership in Trump Organization. For Trump himself, he avoids the gift tax. (Remember, LLCs don't pay taxes directly, their income/loss flows to the owners/partners, and taxes are then paid by them, not the LLC itself.)
      • Trump Organization receives the profit from the LLC. It can then distribute the gains as returns of equity (dividends) rather than as wages. This, for folks in Trump's, including himself, and his kids' income bracket, avoids the double taxation of corporate income and sets the tax rate on the money received at the capital gains rate (likely 20%) rather than at their nominal income tax rate (39.5%).
        
        (Indeed, Trump Organization, because it is 100% family owned, can, unlike public corporations that are widely held, run continual net operating losses and suffer no real consequences for doing so, but that's a topic for another time.)
      • For Trump himself, if the money he earned was ordinary income, he'd initially be taxed on it at his marginal rate of 39.5%. Since he's gotten the deduction noted above, he's instead got a deduction, i.e., not taxed on that money. Yet part of it comes back to him via his use of it to buy stuff from himself, which is indeed income, but it's income that's taxed at 20%.

So there's the net result for Trump and his kids of just what seem like simple transactions:

• Trump gets a $55M deduction and a gift tax deduction.
• His kids get income that's taxed at a far lower rate than their nominal tax rate.

If you've read the details above, you may now be asking, "So what?"

• The "so what" is that Trump is claiming to be self funding, which in manner of speaking he is and to the extent he is, I'm not saying he isn't, but the reality is that while he's telling us he's spent $55M of his own money, he's actually "spent" less than that, a lot less. I doubt that much you'll see in the press and in blogs will go into the details as I have above. The linked article in the preceding sentence, for example, doesn't. I just provided all that so you'd understand at least some of the "hanky panky" (not illegality...it doesn't become illegal until and unless Trump himself makes a profit, which is all but impossible for anyone but the FEC and IRS to determine whether, after all is said and done with the election, he has).
• The "so what" is the appearance of impropriety that exists in the way Trump is funneling money through his campaign back to himself and getting a huge tax deduction in the process.
• The "so what" is that Trump makes claims of financial "corruption" by Mrs. Clinton when, in contrast to her Foundation's activities which are very public, there's almost no way for anyone other than the IRS and the FEC to determine whether there is anything unsavory going on with Trump's own finances. He won't even release tax returns from years not under audit, when his opponent has released some 30+ years of them. (What her speech transcripts have to do with his tax return release is this: nothing. She's already released her tax returns. Why should she release her speech texts in exchange for his tax returns? She can release them in exchange for something else, perhaps the tax returns of Trump Organization (TO), the details of which, as a corporation, would not be included in the content of Trump's personal tax returns beyond the itemization of the dividends received, equity transactions and loans (if any) with TO.)

Will Trumpeteers "get" the above? I don't know. I can only hope that by reading it, and examining the content at the links I provided, they'll at least objectively evaluate the integrity of Trump and his claims. I don't expect some sort o "overnight" transformation, but hopefully this post will inspire a bit more critical analysis and objective circumspection.
​

I'm sure some of you will be quick to point out that Trump has said he won't require his campaign to repay the money he lent to it. Well, as with so much else that man has said, whether that claim holds true remains to be seen. I have yet to any official document that absolves the campaign of the debt nor have I seen Trump's tax return that shows he's written it off. Have you?

 

[tinydancer]

He's finally getting some mega donors along with all the "little guys". I should bump my thread again. It's really cute what they set up for the donation drive.

They came up with teams. Team Yuuuuuuge, Team Deplorable What's important though is one third of that 18 million was from joe and mary 6 packs. I love it. Great organization now.

Would you please substantiate the "one third of that 18 million was from joe and mary 6 packs" aspect of your remark? I read your linked article. I don't see anything about small sum donors. I do see that some "heavy hitters" participated in a "call in" drive Trump held.

• Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks,
• Dallas investor Ray Washburne – who used to head New Jersey governor Chris Christie's effort,
• Financier Roy Bailey

Some of the folks from teams "Yuuuuuuge":

• New York Jets owner Woody Johnson,
• private equity big Lew Eisenberg,
• Republican National Committee finance director Cara Mason

No big money interests there, eh. LOL

I'm thrilled he and the RNC are getting in big money. The cutoff date is approaching so it was a good fundraising drive. And this was needed because he had such a late start on his fundraising.

And the 1/3 report was underneath this picture.

About a third of the money reportedly came in through online donations

Trump raises $18 million in just 24 hours after the debate