Not saying that the US isn’t in fiscal crisis, I’m not at all qualified to say either way, but: Comparing government balance sheets to household finances is a age-old conservative folly designed to encourage the working class to support smaller government in order to reduce taxes on the rich - in other words, encourage the turkeys to vote for Christmas (or in this case maybe Thanksgiving?).
The fact is that government finances and household finances are not at all the same thing, for many reasons I’m not qualified to explain, but a couple of obvious ones:
- Households can’t choose to tax the rich to increase income.
- Households can’t print money.
- Households can’t secure low-interest loans that extend beyond their lifetimes (i.e. issue bonds).
- Households don’t typically find spending increases income (i.e. Government workers pay taxes, infrastructure investment drives growth which increases tax revenue, etc etc).
The UK Conservatives used this line of reasoning around 2010 and it’s led to 15 years of growth stagnation with no real improvement in the debt situation.
Remember… He bankrupted a casino!!!
By design. He sucked out every penny of profit, stiffed all his workers, filed for bankruptcy, and stuck all his creditors with the bills. Then he did it six more times.
That wasn’t incompetence, it was a successful Business Plan, taking advantage of legal loopholes. It worked once, why not rinse and repeat? It’s the American way.
The real question is, does he think he can run a legit business or is his only skill in stealing candy from the pockets of kids as they jump into life rafts of the ship he caused to sink?
He thinks that exploiting the bankruptcy system IS running a legit business, and worse, he thinks he’s a genius for doing it.
I get that. But it is amazing when you see interviews of him back in the 90s and he very obviously couldn’t run a business to save his life. It was always about scams and when called on it his brain would break.
Right, while his casino bankruptcies were an actual business model, that was in the business he was actually best at - real estate development.
Whatever money he made on his bankruptcy scam, he lost on all those other stupid businesses, which were nothing more than stupid rich guy get-rich-quick schemes. Regular people get caught up in Herbalife or Mary Kay, but for a dolt like Trump, he has to blow big entry money on dumb businesses like Vodka, or Steaks, or a University, and lose his shirt.
Exactly.
And when you start looking into his real estate development, the majority of them fall into two camps. Either he sold his name for the property and had absolutely no involvement in them because in the 80’s and 90’s Trump means “classy” OR he was the financial backer while others actually did the development and management of the properties. The vast majority of his failed properties were the ones he actually kept some sort of control over and since he doesn’t pay his workers and wants to operate like a slum lord, all of those properties tended to fail.
If anything all he really did successfully was show how if you start out with a lot of money and have mildly competent people around you then you can make money.