2020.0417.0002...

Opinion...

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Trump and Kushner could reap a pandemic windfall

By Dana Milbank - April 14, 2020

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) have insisted that Congress spend another $250 billion on small businesses devastated by the pandemic, but they refuse to “renegotiate unrelated programs” from last month’s emergency coronavirus bill.

What are they afraid of?

Well, maybe it’s this: As the dust settles on the $2.2 trillion legislation, it has become clear that one of its largest provisions, a $170 billion tax giveaway, appears to be tailor-made for the benefit of wealthy real estate investors such as President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is running one of Trump’s coronavirus task forces.

The giveaway, primarily to real estate investors and hedge funds, is larger than the total amount in the legislation for hospitals ($100 billion) and for relief for all state and local governments ($150 billion). Worse, the bonanza for these millionaires and billionaires has little to do with the coronavirus: It lets them offset losses not just from 2020 but from 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic.

This is repugnant. Cash-strapped states don’t have the funds to care for the sick, much less to do the testing, contact tracing and isolation needed to reopen workplaces and schools. As The Post’s Tony Romm reported Tuesday, more than 2,100 U.S. cities expect major budget shortfalls — and therefore possible cuts to vital public services.

But this provision gives tax filers who earn more than $1 million a year an average windfall of $1.6 million this year alone. (Compare that with the $1,200 break the average wage earner gets.) As The Post’s Jeff Stein reported Tuesday, the Joint Committee on Taxation found that 82 percent of the benefit of this and another tax giveaway in the coronavirus relief bill will go to the 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1 million — and just 3 percent to those who earn less than $100,000.

Of course, we don’t know for sure how Trump could benefit. As you may have heard, he won’t release his tax returns. But we know that the Trump Organization includes hundreds of “pass-through” entities, the type of corporate structure that benefits from the new tax break. We also know that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, have been involved in hundreds of such entities. The windfall is particularly of use to pass-through businesses that lost money in 2018 and 2019 — when the economy was booming but many Trump properties had declining revenue because of Trump’s radioactivity.