Trump Foundation Truth And Poetry
Now I’m not a Trump supporter by any means. I attended a rally in Worcester Mass in 2015, which I reported on here. He suggested in his speech that John Kerry screwed up in Iran so badly because he hadn’t read Art of the Deal. I followed up the rally by reading Art of The Deal myself. My conclusion, based on his own words, was that I did not want this man to be in charge of anything I was involved with including my country. Nonetheless, I am inclined to “give the guy a little”, as Tony Schrantz pleads. The most that can be reasonably extracted from the NY AG complaint is some lessons about how not to run a private foundation. The closing lines of the Bruce Hopkins poem sums it up pretty well.
The lesson here is obvious – exempt orgs and foundation law can be tricky.
Yet, running a private foundation is really rather straightforward, quite easy.
The Trump Foundation overlooked the greatest solution in this situation:
Hire a bunch of foundation lawyers, pay them well; that’s the safest alchemy.
Using Bank Of America As Trustee Can Be Costly For Massachusetts Residents
The abatement applications for the 34 trusts totaled $2,287,707. The Massachusetts income tax rate in 2008 was 5.3%. I’ve been trying to do a back of the envelope computation to estimate how much in assets under management must be there and then project that to nearly 3,000 trusts. I’m going to go with many billions. It would seem that the beneficiaries of these trusts would be a lot a better off, if the trusts were domiciled some place other than Massachusetts. If they suggest to BOA, that it should resign in favor of such a trustee, what is its counterargument? Then there is the question of future trust business. It seems like there are some really high stakes here. It may be that the solution will be to drop the trustee function into a subsidiary in a friendlier jurisdiction maybe Alaska or Florida, which have rewritten their perpetuity rules to allow for dynasty trusts that are really dynastic. Then again, Massachusetts might redesign its fiduciary income tax system to hang onto white collar jobs. It should be interesting.
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Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.