One of the big giveaways the Republican tax scam offered to rich people came in the form of a 20 percent deduction for pass-through businesses. And as the Treasury Department decides what businesses will qualify as pass-throughs for that tax break, lo and behold, in the middle of a rule that will already overwhelmingly benefit people making $1 million or more, it looks like Donald Trump will benefit bigly.
While the Treasury Department’s regulation on how to interpret the pass-through provision blocks companies based on the “reputation or skill” of their owners from taking the deduction, and while the Trump Organization functions substantially by slapping the name Trump on everything in sight:
That provision appears to allow a company that earns some of its income by licensing its owner’s name to apply the 20 percent deduction to other income that does not flow from licensing. That could be important for Mr. Trump, whose companies have licensed the Trump name to hotels and products around the world. Tax lawyers said Wednesday that the regulations could have prohibited Trump companies from deducting much more — if not all — of their income, instead of allowing the income streams to be separated.
“To the extent that he’s getting income from licensing the use of his name, it looks like he is ineligible for the deduction,” said Lily Batchelder, a New York University law professor and former Obama administration official. “But even if that licensing income was, hypothetically, 51 percent of his business’s income, I think it’s treated as a separate trade or business so he can get the deduction on the other 49 percent of his income.”
It’s worth pausing to note that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has distinguished himself as one of the great suck-ups of a cabinet filled with suck-ups, and it’s his department making this rule that appears to benefit Trump directly.
This whole thing is an abomination of a giveaway to the wealthy separate from any specific benefit to Donald Trump’s bank account, but that’s the decadent icing on the deluxe cake.