My wife is NOT political at all. Let’s just get that out there. She depends on me to give her the unvarnished truth as far as that goes, and she makes her choices off of that. She had never even registered to vote until we got together 4 years ago. Now, we discuss things a lot. She kind of leans republican at times, but let’s call it a sane type of it, unlike what things have been like for the last 20+ years. She thinks there should be time limits on benefits, but she also believes people on them should be supported well enough to get some kind of free education while they are on them. But, she does believe that single payer should be enacted, so there’s that.
Anyway, she informed me that his billion dollar loss doesn’t mean shit. Her words, not mine. Most of it was probably not even his to lose. She told me that it was most likely highly leveraged assets provided by someone else. It doesn’t mean anything except he sucks at asset management. Not only that, he was hiding this loss, because there are ways to move this liability to other people to minimize your damage and offset what they owe. Common trick in her field, and legal, but not ethical.
Not only that, his combined earnings (interest included) was only 10 million dollars. C’mon, Dan Rather makes more than that a year! The 7 million dollar interest figure means he has somewhere between 100 to 150 million in interest-bearing instruments. If he is worth 4 billion, that is an insanely low amount of liquidity.
If he is still using that loss, and it IS available for 18 years, Then he can’t be making more than 50 million a year. Period. If he is not paying taxes now because of that loss, he is still in negative income relative to that loss. There is no other way to do it, unless he has lost even more. Also, he only paid himself 6000 in salary. Can you say FICA scam? I knew you could.
Here’s another thing: If it wasn’t his money, then it doesn’t count as a loss to him. His negativity in his income doesn’t exist. In other words, if you didn’t put up the money, then you can’t take the hit for losing it. So, most likely, the rules have been bent, if not broken somewhere.
Anyway, I will explore this more in the future with her, and post more of what she has to say about it. One interesting thing she had to say was, if this assignment came up in her office, she would physically threaten her boss to get it assigned to her. Yep, she is that much of a hardass. lol