In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan repeated, again and again, a fabricated story of a welfare recipient regally arriving in a white Cadillac to pick up her monthly check. The facile fiction became a model for generations of Republicans lamenting a "culture of dependency."
In 2016, the GOP has shown a change of heart. This year, Republicans have nominated a welfare queen for president.
Over his storied career, Donald J. Trump has raked in $885 million in public handouts — "tax breaks, grants and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings" — in New York alone, according to a recent report in the New York Times.
That figure doesn't include public subsidies pocketed by Trump in New Jersey, Illinois, Florida — and many countries across the world. Nor the millions Trump has saved on income taxes leaping through loopholes. His accountants are the best. Beautiful! Believe me.
If the alleged billionaire really is as rich as he claims (Show us your tax returns, Donald!), a substantial part of his wealth came at public expense. Trump is less self-made man than ward of the state.
Donald Trump Jr. recently said releasing his father's taxes would be "a distraction." Trump the Elder has created more than his share of distractions. Does he pay his fair share of taxes? He professes outrage at those who don't.
"They make a fortune. They pay no tax," Trump said of U.S. corporate executives last year. "It's ridiculous, OK?"
He should know. In 1978 and 1979, then-millionaire Donald Trump paid no income taxes, according to tax returns he turned over to New Jersey casino license officials, the Washington Post reported.
Trump, again, may have paid no income taxes in 1991 and 1993, according to New Jersey gambling commission records examined by Politico, the political news website.
Trump brags that he knows how to work a rigged system. He has much less to say about how he'd unrig it. On both points, he's not alone.
Our nation is pocked by business owners cashing in by tapping public treasuries. The New York Times, in a 2012 series, estimated that the tax breaks have reached $80 billion — each and every year. The same analysis gauged Minnesota's at $239 million annually. That's $45 a year for every man, woman and child in the state.
Want to know how the "1 percent" got so wealthy? Subsidies and income tax breaks are on-ramps on the road to riches. Breaks on income taxes. Breaks on property taxes. Breaks on sales taxes.
Tax law overshadows many art museums in displays of creativity. The ways for the rich to avoid taxes are as many as the brush strokes on a Rubens. Tax abatements, rebates, grants, enterprise zone income tax breaks, trusts and foundations.
(Yes, maybe the Clintons shook down billionaires to contribute to their foundation. But their foundation saved lives. Trump used his to buy himself gifts, make charitable contributions he claimed came from his own pocket and to settle lawsuits against his companies.)
My favorite twist in Subsidy Land: Paying no sales tax on materials and services used in construction. Tell that to your tax collector when the time comes to remodel a bathroom or rebuild a ramshackle garage.
Diverting public money for private gain has become commonplace — at least, for people with the money for influential lobbyists and canny tax advisers.
Stadiums, shopping malls, hotels, parking garages, office parks, housing projects — what gets built these days without a public subsidy? The phrase "public/private partnership" should warn taxpayers to hang onto their wallets.
Businesses don't ask for help; they demand it. They're entitled.
"We're job creators!" Never mind that many companies boost profits by paring, rather than increasing, payrolls.
"Pay up or we'll leave!" By playing states off against each other in bidding wars, public subsidies make company moves more likely rather than less so.
"We're big taxpayers!" Even when what you're after is to pay less tax?
The Minneapolis City Council's enthusiasm for doling out handouts to developers has cooled, in the face of failures such as City Center, Block E and Gaviidae Common. All it took was 30 years of projects that delivered on few — if any — of their promises.
But the Star Tribune, in an article last year, noted that Twin Cities suburbs continue to turn to public subsidies as an economic development tool, from Edina and Wayzata and Eagan to Champlin and Bloomington.
In most cases, the public aid amounts to a few million here, a few million there. So routine many may not even notice. But they add up as property taxes rise for the rest of us.
In Trump's case, what taxpayers have foregone reaches summits few others have approached.
Trump's first big Manhattan development, the 30-story Grand Hyatt at Grand Central Station, won "an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980," the Times found.
Such sweetheart deals for the 1 percent — at the expense of the rest of us — should be part of the political debate, what with Freddie the Freeloader running for president. But public policies that engineer a huge transfer of wealth are overshadowed by loose talk about women, minorities, immigrants, Vladimir Putin and promises to play bully in the volatile Middle East. (Educated guess: Nuclear war is bad for business.)
With subsidies, taxpayers take the risk — often in the name of "jobs, jobs, jobs" that may or may not appear — to the benefit of the owner class, who keep the gains.
Meanwhile, roads and bridges need to be built and maintained, millions of children must be educated, libraries and health centers financed, and the nation defended by a strong military.
Where are Trump and other tax-avoiders when the time comes to pay? Absent. And too often proud of it.
Trump brags about sponging off others. It's a long list that includes not only investors, lenders, business partners and Trump University hopefuls but taxpayers. Yes, gentle reader, you are among Trump's chumps.
"It's called OPM. I do it all the time in business. It's called other people's money," Trump said. "There's nothing like doing things with other people's money because it takes the risk — you get a good chunk out of it and it takes the risk [elsewhere]."
I first took note of Trump's financial sleights of hand in 1988, when I was the Star Tribune's New York correspondent and the Donald was basking in flattering articles in newspapers and magazines about the "Trump Princess," his sumptuous yacht. Most coverage fixated on the onyx bathrooms and the gold-plated (of course) faucets.
I fixated on the tax implications. Was Trump getting a tax break on his $29 million boat?
At first glance, the answer seemed to be no. In 1986, Congress ended personal deductions tied to personal property write-offs for the rich. But lawmakers left a loophole large enough for a 291-foot yacht to sail through.
The yacht actually was owned, not by Trump, but by Resorts International, the hotel/casino company that the Reagan-era robber baron then controlled. Resorts was allowed to write off yacht expenses and depreciation.
In short: You and I, as taxpayers, were taken for a ride without ever having set foot on the "Trump Princess" deck.
A perfectly lovely public subsidy came to an abrupt end in 1991, when Trump sold the yacht to a member of the Saudi royal family for $20 million. By then, Trump had run Resorts International into the ground and, with no income, the company had no use for an income tax shelter. Trump was a loser. A loser, I tell you!
Still, he was more broad-minded in those days. Trump apparently thought highly of Muslims when they were handing him a check.
"I like money. I'm very greedy," Trump said earlier this year. "I'm a greedy person. I shouldn't tell you that, I'm greedy — I've always been greedy. I love money, right?"
Let's take Trump at his word. This one time.
Mike Meyers, a former Star Tribune business reporter, is a Minneapolis writer.
