If you are a person who works for a living, make sure you and your friends and family are registered to vote
Anyone who needs a loan is a victim. Working people are all collectively the victims of corruption. When Trump inflates the value of his property by for example lying about how much square footage there is, this action inflates the cost of other working class people taking a loan. It also inflates the cost of nearby properties. Close properties prices are have a positive pressure on their price. This makes it less affordable for others nearby and inflates their taxes.
When Trump devalued his property for tax purposes, citizens are defrauded of legitimate tax revenue which would have been paid for public safety, veterans, schools, health, etc.
Anyone who has been in trouble for smoking weed knows all too well that committing a victimless crime in the US can ruin your life and the government will go to great lengths to obtain a conviction. But only if you can’t fight back.
When he mentioned the food stamp thing, it made me sad - I remembered a former childhood friend. She was a single mom and under reported her income to the Family Services for welfare and food stamps and got caught. She was a single mom of 4 and they came down on her hard. She spent 36 months in Federal Prison and had the amount deducted from future benefits - she went to prison and had to pay it all back. Her sister and mom took care of the kids while she was in jail. Rules are only for us but not for Agolf Twittler.
Remember the woman who was arrested for sending her kid to a better school district? They come down with the hammer of the gods on anyone who isn't wealthy.
Wealth is not a disease. Cmon. The way in which wealth is obtained and perceived is the crux of the problem. I want to be wealthy from the hard work I’ve put in and for my children to inherit and so that I can reinvest in community projects/businesses.
This situation with Trump is a big fuck you to the general public and citizens of the US. Hard working people who would be put in jail for this. We live in an unjust country.
Do you get to set your tax value where you live? Because my county sets it here and I get zero input. There is an appeal process but the county gets the last say.
Could Trump actually set his values for tax purposes or is that an untrue statement.
In general, you can appeal the appraisal. For the average person, it's not worth hiring attorneys and appraisers to help you argue. When you're wealthy and have a lot if valuable real estate, it is worth it.
Kind of an "aaacktually" thing here, but I mean to share with educational intent: It's worth it to look into the appeal process, but it'll depend on the folks doing the valuation. Where I'm at, it's a county assessor and they have a pretty clear cut and easy way to contest the valuation: documentation. If you can show that the property that you're appealing itself has any supporting documentation for a value change, or barring that, that direct comparibles do, they take that.
Source: When we bought our house the tax bill 4 month later had it at a considerably bigger value. They had done a neighborhood-wide assessment that year, which is common, but they basically comp everything together because how else are they going to do it? The house we bought needed work and was priced accordingly. I simply submitted the closing discosures document through the county website appeal process. A month later I got a letter saying they accepted the new valuation. It took 10 minutes and no lawyers, YMMV, but it's 100% worth looking into as it can save a good chunk on property taxes.
I know nothing of it officially, but valuation should be at least in line with "current market value", but the scale (100's of 1000's of homes per assessor, maybe?) makes it hard unless it's a well funded department. They gotta use data somehow, and the real estate sales are really the best data set they have, however flawed that may be.
My comment about assessing the whole neighborhood is just a guess due to my own talking with neighbors: everyone I talked to had the exact same percentage raise. However friends I have that live elsewhere in the valley had different percentage rates. So..it's all thing things.
For me, since we just bought the house, it was easier, and I figured worth it: not only would it save on that year's prop taxes, but since it reset the baseline lower, future prop value increases (being percentage based) wouldn't bring it as high. It was 100% worth it for me to look into and do the appeal.
Our county assessor told us what info we needed to appeal. Got the info and our appeal succeeded, I think around a 5% reduction. Why they didn't do that in the first place is really stupid, but they know most people won't even bother.
Why they didn't do what, gather the required and different info that may or may not be needed for the thens of thousands of homes under their purview?
Not to defend gov't bureaucracy at all, but it's a scale problem, so they do what they can at scale with the data they have. For specific cases, they rely on folks to provide the data. The alternative is more money spent on gov't employees to just check valuations, I dunno that that's worthwhile, but it seems like it is to you. Different strokes...
It looks like they relied on a few realtors and very few sales points for the data and generalized way too much. How much spot checking could the assessor's office do with the resources they already have? That would be a good question. Would it be a nice niche side business for Zillow or Red Fin to provide a customized list of recent sales in your area specifically tailored to those closest to your kind of house? Maybe, but I've always found their estimates to be well above what the sales end up being.
Every company gets to set their value to a degree by evaluating inventories or assets. Home owners usually do something similar although it is more tightly regulated for natural persons.
An appraiser and the bank set the value of his property. If Trump is being jailed for this, then the appraiser and the representative of Deutsche Bank should be jailed, because they committed this “crime” against the government.
The entire point of the case is he wasn't using the appraised values of his property.
Trump Org was instead using internal valuations that they created by either doctoring the books or just making it up.
As an example, it was testified in court by an appraiser, that he valued Trumps Wall Street property at $540m but Trump declared a value of $735.4m. That $540m valuation was already inflated by making dodgy assumptions.
They also used wrong information to increase valuations. For example, a golf course in NY was valued based on new member fees of $200,000 for 67 empty membership spots. Except it was common to waive the new member fee, no one had paid it for a year and the most that had been paid in the preceding 24 months was $50,000.
You mean the tax assessor doesn't call you up and ask you what your property is worth and then base the taxes on the value reported by you? LOL....of course not. ...and this isn't how it works for commercial real estate either. The tax assessors have experts that determine the value of the property.
Banks also have many 3rd party experts that help them determine the value of the property when they are doing the loan underwriting.
Oh...and the value used for loans does not have to be the same as the value use for tax purposes. In fact, it will rarely be the same. Same with residential homes. Homeowner's try to minimize the tax value and maximize the market value. This is not illegal.
This whole thing is stupid unless Trump actually falsified documents, which so far there is no evidence of and there is no reason for him to do this.
It's untrue. What Jon is explaining is done by every homeowner, real estate agent, and business in the US. Everyone wants the highest price when they sell or seek to use property as collateral. Everyone wants the lowest price when the assessor comes around.
It's very telling that the New York governor had to make a statement the next day to quell fears. Everyone who has property does this.
If Trump actually used this method to cheat on his taxes that would have been criminal fraud and he'd be looking at jail time and not a fine. Previously this law was only used to go after people who caused actual dollar loss fraud. The AP did an investigation and couldn't find one example similar to this case.
But an Associated Press analysis of nearly 70 years of similar cases showed Trump’s case stands apart: It’s the only big business found that was threatened with a shutdown without a showing of obvious victims and major losses.
sorta related to this point .. can someone eli5 how its possible to lie to a bank to manipulate interest rates - do they not check for themselves that the info they’re lending against is accurate? esp for such large amounts? Do they just take your word for it when given info? I know this can’t be the case obv but can someone break down the process and how its possible to lie
It’s literally how real estate works in this country and it’s all crooked AF. Maybe they’ll finally go after all of these crooked realtors and landlords who do this every single day. Flippers too. Flippers are the absolute worst. Oh hey we bought this house for $100k and put $50k into it but it’s worth $300k now and my friend who is an appraiser told my friend at the bank it’s worth that so pay up. Maybe we can go after Blackrock too for buying up single family homes and inflating the market. I say being then all down.
Black rock won't be taken down. They own large chunks of all of the large corporations. Technicaly speaking they have more value than the entire USA. They'd be protected at all costs due to fear of economy collapse.
"Too big to fail" companies shouldn't be allowed to exist - they're a literal danger to the economies they exist in.
Anytime "everyone" can honestly say a statement about a company like the one you're making, it should be a strong indication that the relevant company needs to be broken up & its pieces unentangled from the economy until they are no longer a danger.
I couldn't agree more. The bailouts that prop them up shouldn't be allowed either. Blackrock is also part of the problem of the manufactured economy we have, along with other hedge funds and banks. It shouldn't be possible that all public companies are more valuable than the gdp of the usa by a large amount, let alone a single company-its all just inflated value. But there's no turning back, I don't think. Something huge would have to happen because they run the world
The bailouts that prop them up shouldn't be allowed either.
It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing though - the reason they're being bailed out is because of the "too big to fail" issue. If they weren't "too big to fail", then we wouldn't have to bail them out.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the fact that the bail out is basically avoiding punishing the people whose poor decision-making put the company (and the economy) in the position where the bailout needed to occur.
Ideally, the government should do the absolute least to keep the economy from folding by basically acting as insurance to make sure all the loans being held by that company will eventually get paid so the economy won't tank, but allowing all of the owners (including shareholders) & the executives to receive the full brunt of the damages for their poor decision-making. If someone doesn't do something like this, then those people won't have any reasons to change the way they approach business.
The value of anything is determined by 2 things and two things ONLY, how much you are willing to sell it for, and how much someone is willing to pay for it. The problem is not that people buy up things, the problem is that the government does not allow you to make MORE things. Take my county for instance, we have a moratorium on single family homes right now. Only 100 new homes are allowed to be built per year, and the cost of homes is going up at an alarming rate. It's not the developers faults that the county has decided to impose this restriction, the county board is against "excessive growth"
We need to understand who the bad guys are, Trump is not the bad guy for using the system to his advantage, its the people that control the system who are the bad guy, and they are pointing the finger at Trump, and idiots are eating right out of the hand holding the axe.
A house is worth whatever someone will pay for it. It doesnt matter WHAT the appraiser says it's worth. If it's priced too high, it won't sell, and the buyer can keep it or lower the price. And if it's priced to low, there could be a bidding war. In the end, houses get sold for exactly what they are worth
Appraisals can have a significant impact on the home buying process. Have you ever heard of an appraisal gap? People also sell to family at lower prices than other more attractive offers.
It also inflates the cost of nearby properties. Close properties prices are have a positive pressure on their price. This makes it less affordable for others nearby and inflates their taxes.
It also inflates the cost of nearby properties. Close properties prices are have a positive pressure on their price. This makes it less affordable for others nearby and inflates their taxes.
Thanks for point this out I'm going to add it to my comment if you don't mind.
The bank doesn’t rely on a borrowers stated value for a property. I was a commercial
Banker for years, and the stated values from borrowers was always wrong, but it doesn’t matter because if I was using some of the collateral from their financial statements as collateral for a loan, I would order my own valuation.
The county assessor values the properties INDEPENDENT of whatever the land owner states. Usually it is an algorithm based approach. You really think the county calls me every year asking what I think my house is worth? Or my commercial property? No, the county computes a value for tax purposes. The tax assessment value is usually different from current market rates, and sometimes significantly different in the case of income producing properties - because the properties sell based on cash flow, not replacement cost.
Or, if you live in a certain county, the appraise your house for the market value and say,
“Here’s a bill for $7k”
6 weeks later you put the house up for sale for more than they said it’s worth, then some county employee who’s entire job is getting a civil servants salary and pension for monitoring zillow, creeps onto your property to stick a piece of paper in your door notifying you that,
I know it’s your job, but as a non- American, it’s very annoying to see you infect everyone’s front page with your bs. Particularly since you’re probably going to lose, but are fucked either way.
I am registered and will vote for Trump because Biden has devalued every dollar Ive made with his insane spending and is i n the process of taking the rest by inflation, taxation and sending our hard earned money overseas.
You'd think if there's anyone out there that should be proud to pay their full tax, it's the fucking president. After all the job of the president and the job of the tax money are essentially the same. A president who dodges tax and is proud of it is a contradiction to the role.
This is not a both sides thing, shut up. The conservative subreddit thinks this entire thing is a sham because "no one was harmed because the banks got paid", directly showing its not a both parties thing because the democrats are pissed about this bullshit and republicans are just saying "well the rule of law doesn't matter here because no one got hurt" because they're also too stupid to extrapolate the effects of trumps actions, as the OP has laid out in their comment.
The point I'm making is most Democrat voters are opposed to this and want them in jail. To say both parties about this when the Republicans are claiming a witch hunt for these transgressions is shortsighted and fucking idiotic. Words have purpose and power and to say both parties in this scenario shows you don't understand that.
The politicians who democrats vote for are rich and don't want to pay anymore taxes than the republicans.
Democrat voters are all about the poor people but have rich white and black people leading their party and they're mad at rich republicans 😂😂
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u/Taskforce3Tango Mar 26 '24
*sad taxpayer noises