by Donald Trump
We need a president who will sign the bipartisan legislation to force a proper valuation of China’s currency. We need a president who will slap the Chinese with a 25 percent tax on all their products entering America if they don’t stop undervaluing the yuan. We need a president who will crack down on China’s massive and blatant intellectual property theft that allows China to pirate our products (maybe if Obama didn’t view entrepreneurs and businesspeople as the enemy he’d be more aggressive about this). Most of all, we need a president who is smart and tough enough to recognize the national security threat China poses in the new frontier of cyber warfare.
It may seem to many that I speak very badly about China and its representatives. The truth is I have great respect for the people of China. I also have great respect for the people that represent China. What I don’t respect is the way that we negotiate and deal with China. Over the years, I have done many deals and transactions with the Chinese. I have made a tremendous amount of money. I have sold apartments for $53 million, $33 million, and many at smaller numbers. I built one of the largest jobs in Manhattan with Chinese partners and made a great deal of money. So I know the Chinese, and understand and respect the Chinese.
Whenever I speak badly of what they are doing to us, I am not blaming them—I am blaming our leaders and representatives. If we could get away with it against them, I would strongly encourage us to do so. Unfortunately, they are too smart and our leaders are not smart enough.
I have many friends in China who cannot believe that their leaders are able to make such unbelievably favorable deals. I can understand it more easily than they can. Our leaders are rather, to put it succinctly, stupid. The amazing thing is, despite all of the hard rhetoric and strong words I use against China, Bloomberg Businessweek recently did an article about the thing the Chinese most want. Notable is a quote by real estate president Asher Alcobi of his Chinese clients’ preferences: “Anything that has the Trump name is good.”40
So, I speak badly of China, but I speak the truth and what do the consumers in China want? They want Trump. You know what that means? That means that they respect people who tell it like it is and speak the truth, even if that truth may not be so nice towards them. In fact, it is my respect for the Chinese that leads me to tell our leaders to be careful. The Chinese will take and take and take until we have nothing left—and who can blame them if they can get away with it?
China is our enemy. It’s time we start acting like it . . . and if we do our job correctly, China will gain a whole new respect for the United States, and we can then happily travel the highway to the future with China as our friend.
FOUR
IT’S YOUR MONEY–YOU SHOULD KEEP MORE OF IT
The paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.1
—President John F. Kennedy
The first sixteen hours of your forty-hour workweek you work for free. Put another way, the first four and a half months of the entire year, you work for absolutely nothing—the government confiscates every last penny of your hard-earned money in the form of taxes.
That’s terrible. The economic robbery of it all is offensive enough, but equally infuriating is the amount of freedom and time the government is stealing from you as well. Imagine having sixteen hours more each week to spend with your family, or volunteering sixteen more hours every week at your favorite charity, or spending sixteen additional hours each week working on your business or next entrepreneurial venture. Imagine your paycheck was 40 percent higher than it currently is. What could you do with 40 percent more wealth? How many jobs and opportunities for others could you create? The longer you really think about it the madder you will get, especially when you consider the waste, fraud, and abuse the federal government traffics in as it inflicts its self-defeating policies on hard-working Americans.
But does that stop Obama and his “progressive” pals? No. In fact, they think the real problem isn’t that your taxes are too high but that they are too low. If only those stingy wage-earners would cough up more cash, the administration reasons, benevolent government bureaucrats could redistribute it more fairly and wisely.
Look, paying taxes is a part of life, and we need to fund the things individuals can’t do for themselves, like national defense and infrastructure, and yes, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” the Gospel of Matthew reminds us. But as one fellow Christian told me, “God only asks me to tithe 10 percent to do His good works. Obama wants far, far more.”
Judging from their actions, progressives don’t even believe their own hype. Anyone who thinks they should pay higher taxes is free to send more money to the federal government. There’s no law that says you can’t pay additional taxes. In 1843 the Treasury Department established a special fund that remains to this day, called the “Gifts to the United States Government Fund” for “individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States.”2 Citizens can send in their checks at any time. But when the average American already spends more in taxes than they do on food, shelter, and clothing combined, it’s not hard to see why very few would do such a thing. Making mountains of money and creating millions of jobs would be a far more “patriotic” gesture than fattening an already morbidly obese federal government.
In 2002, at the state level, an enterprising Virginia Delegate, Republican Kirkland Cox, set up a “Tax Me More Fund” in Virginia to see if the people who scream loudest about wanting higher taxes would put their money where their mouths were. To date, over the last eight years, the fund has netted a laughable $12,887, an amount so tiny it can’t even fund the salary of a single part-time state worker.3 Bottom line: if liberals really thought giving more of their hard-earned money to government was a great idea, they would do it. But they don’t.
No doubt you work hard for your money—I know I do—and you should be permitted to keep more of it. Anything less creates a disincentive for a strong national work ethic. President Ronald Reagan, saw it the same way:The more government takes in taxes, the less incentive people have to work. What coal miner or assembly-line worker jumps at the offer of overtime when he knows Uncle Sam is going to take sixty percent or more of his extra pay? . . . Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong.
If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they’ll be more industrious; they’ll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all—and more revenue for government.4
As with most things, President Reagan had it right. But Reagan wasn’t the only president who understood that lower taxes yield higher revenues by unleashing economic growth and job creation. To many Democrats’ chagrin, Reagan was merely echoing the economic thoughts of President John F. Kennedy, who had already said, in 1962, “The paradoxical truth is that the tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now.”5
Reagan and Kennedy’s views prove that smart tax policy shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It should be common sense. If you tax something you get less of it. It’s as simple as that. The more you tax work, the less people are willing to work. The more you tax investments, the fewer investments you’ll get. This isn’t rocket science.
But Obama isn’t interested in common sense. He’s too busy using class warfare rhetoric to try to make you forget the disaster of his first term and give him a second. Take, for example, his rants and temper tantrums about making evil corporate jet owners pay higher taxes. If I thought for a minute that this was the solution to our $15 trillion debt, I would endorse it. But calling for higher taxes
on private jet owners is a political joke. In fact, as the Washington Post points out, it’s such an embarrassing idea that the White House couldn’t even come up with an estimate for the amount of revenue such a proposal would generate. Still, others estimate the amount it would take in over ten years would be $3 billion.6 That’s 0.0002 percent of the national debt. Not only would a jet tax do absolutely nothing to put a dent in the debt, it would also have a negative economic impact on the workers who manufacture and maintain those aircraft. Don’t forget all of the many jobs provided by the private jet industry . . . including the much-needed manufacturing jobs.
That’s the kind of empty, unserious rhetoric we get from this president. Obama bashes rich people and then vacations with them at Martha’s Vineyard before jetting around the country doing million-dollar campaign fundraisers with rich liberals. All this from a guy who lectured Americans about tightening their belts, eating their peas, and not vacationing in Vegas to gamble at casinos. (I can’t believe he can win the state of Nevada with his statements and its very high unemployment.)
Obama’s Clueless on Taxes
Obama needs to wake up, stop taking so many vacations (I’ve never seen anything like it), and quit messing around. He also needs to learn how the real world of business operates. Everyone knows that the worst thing to do during a recession or an economic downturn is to raise taxes on anyone. It may be an inconvenient truth for the president and his horrific economic team, but business owners are the people who create jobs. Two-thirds of all jobs created in America are created by small business owners. With unemployment soaring under this president, you would think he would want to do everything he can to get unemployment down and hiring up. But he doesn’t. Instead, he and his political advisors think trashing wealth creators and companies will score political points and somehow spare him defeat in 2012.
He’s wrong. People are smart. They know you can’t be “for” jobs but against those who create them. It doesn’t work. All raising taxes on businesses does is force business owners to lay off employees they can no longer afford. It also drives up prices, encourages businessmen and women to move their businesses (and their jobs) to other countries that have far lower tax rates and regulatory costs, and sends people scrambling for tax shelters. The kid on the side of the street with a lemonade stand knows that, but not this guy. He’s never worked in the private sector or made a payroll. And for a president who likes to showcase how hip and tech savvy he is, Obama also appears surprisingly clueless about how easy it is now for anyone to outsource jobs to foreign workers with just the click of a mouse. In our broadband, high-speed Internet world, the old brick-and-mortar barriers of business have vanished. That means capital can now pivot instantly to dodge ever-increasing government regulations and taxes.
Obama isn’t the only one who’s hazy eyed about the reality of taxes in America. In fact, lots of people have bought into the liberal lies we’ve heard for decades. The first of these is the one about how the middle and lower classes pay the overwhelming majority of the tax burden, letting the rich off the tax hook. If people would just stop and think about how loony this is, they would see that the very notion defies the laws of math. For starters, half of America doesn’t even pay a single penny in federal income taxes.7 That may shock you, but it’s true. That’s one of the reasons soaring federal spending is so dangerous: half the country shrugs its shoulders and says, “Who cares? It’s not my money they’re spending.” So the idea that the lower class is shouldering the tax burden is absurd, because the bottom half of Americans pay no federal income tax at all.
There’s more. The top 1 percent of wage-earners in America pay for more than the entire bottom 95 percent—combined. And the top 10 percent of income earners foot 71 percent of the federal income tax bill.8 “To put this in perspective,” says Scott Hodge at the Tax Foundation, “the top 1 percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers.” 9 The always business savvy Neil Cavuto from Fox News puts it this way:It’d be like going out to dinner with friends. Your buddy at the table picks up the bill, and some knucklehead has the audacity to say, “Joe, you should have left a bigger tip.” Now, some Democrats promoting the class war say, “Good, that’s the way it should be. And yeah, Joe, you should have left a bigger tip.” But when you realize that the richest among us are paying for the bounty of the government for us. . . . We should at least, now and then, try a thank-you.10
I don’t need a thank-you note from anyone. I make lots of money and pay lots of taxes. That’s fine. But the misinformation and lies so-called “progressives” spew is ridiculous. Why demonize rich people? Who doesn’t want to get rich? How do these people think charities get funded? Who do they think creates jobs? Rich people, business people, people who work very, very hard!
But here’s the really fascinating part—the part liberals remain clueless about: if the federal government really wants to “stick it” to rich folks and confiscate more of their hard-earned money to fund their insane spending sprees on counterproductive social programs then they should lower, not raise, tax rates. As my friend Steve Forbes explains, before President Reagan instituted the Reagan tax cuts, the richest 1 percent of Americans paid 18 percent of all federal income taxes. The top marginal rates then went from a suffocating 70 percent down to 28 percent. And what was the result? Their portion of the national tax bill actually doubled—they paid 36 percent of federal income taxes and produced 23 percent of the nation’s income.11 As President Reagan explained, “A few economists call this principle supply-side economics. I just call it common sense.”12
The reason this country is an economic disaster right now is because Barack Obama doesn’t understand how wealth is created–and how the federal government can destroy it. He also doesn’t understand just how mobile wealth is today. People now have options. Individuals and businesses can play ball anywhere in the world. For example, Ireland’s corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent. America’s? We’re the second highest in the world, just behind Japan at a ridiculous 39 percent. That means businessmen can save up to 26.5 percent in taxes just by relocating their business abroad. And they are—in droves. In fact, the international average corporate tax rate is 26 percent.13 Even socialist economies understand that high corporate taxes are a death knell for jobs and economic growth. High tax rates are literally transferring wealth and jobs abroad, which only reduces the revenues the federal government would have otherwise collected.
The other thing about high corporate tax rates is that, in the end, companies aren’t the ones who foot the bill, consumers do. The Tax Foundation ran the numbers and found that in 2007, the federal corporate income tax collected $370 billion. They further concluded that the average American household pays $3,190 in corporate income taxes each year. 14 Again, Barack Obama doesn’t understand what Ronald Reagan understood. Here’s how President Reagan explained the corrosive influence of corporate taxes on the average American:Some say shift the tax burden to business and industry, but business doesn’t pay taxes. Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. Business is being taxed, so much so that we’re being priced out of the world market. But business must pass its costs of operations—and that includes taxes—on to the customer in the price of the product. Only people pay taxes, all the taxes. Government just uses business in a kind of sneaky way to help collect the taxes. They’re hidden in the price; we aren’t aware of how much tax we actually pay.15
Reagan was right. If Americans understood just how many hidden government fees and taxes are absorbed into the prices of the goods and services they buy, they would be irate. Consider the fact that for every gallon of gas you put in your car, you pay 45.8 cents in state, local, and federal taxes. So if you fill up your tank and pump twenty gallons, you just blew $9.16 on taxes. Hidden fees affect everything, even recreational and leisure activities. For example, a fisherman pays 10 percent of the sales price on sport-fishing equipment in hidden taxes, and
archers foot a federal tax on arrows of 45 cents per shaft and another 11 percent on quivers. If you book a seat on a domestic flight, you pay a 7.5 percent tax on your ticket. You’ll get hit with another $3.60 tax, plus an additional $2.50 security tax for each leg of your trip. If you travel abroad, there’s a $16.10 international arrival/departure tax, as well as a $4.50 fee for a “passenger-facility charge.” This is why the price you’re quoted for an airline ticket suddenly jumps when you pay the bill.16
Some people have less of a problem with so-called “sin taxes” on items government wants to discourage you from using. The federal tax on a pack of cigarettes is $1.01 a pack, on a six-pack of beer it’s 33 cents. Some people say, “Well, those aren’t good for you anyhow, so we should tax those things higher.” Similarly, heating oil, which ensures that people up north can keep their homes warm during the winter, gets taxed by most states. The point is that all these sneaky taxes are nickeling and diming Americans to death. Worse, they mask the real costs associated with big government. If the average American was aware of just how much money government poaches from their pockets each year—an estimated 40 percent of your paycheck—there would be a tax revolt that would make the Boston Tea Party look like amateur hour.17