Tony K's Blog

I recently wrote a post as a thought experiment —Hypothesis Trump is moral and ethical. In a nutshell, that hypothesis is disproven. Some people read my headline and assumed that I am pro-Trump. I am not. I have never believed that Trump is a good person. His actions in the White House have demonstrated that enriching himself and his family is a high priority of his administration. At the same time, I know I live in an echo chamber that accentuates the negatives about Trump, and seldom presents different possibilities. In my view, the possibility existed that most of Trump's accomplishments had been relatively harmless signals to his constituency. Many people believe that Trump has caused a lot of damage tot he country (including reputational), despite lack of significant progress, and I get that. I think that until now, most of the damage has been easily reversible. I selected this issue as the litmus test, because there was pretty widespread belief among economists and l...

Background: The tax bill recently passed by Congress will have two results: benefits will go down for the majority of Americans and taxes will go up for the majority of Americans. Donald Trump and his family are in a position in which they will overwhelmingly benefit. They do not need most of the benefits, and DT's inheritance taxes alone will decrease by $4 billion . His family will also benefit enormously from the change in the pass-through rate. I am assuming that he pays taxes in the US at all, which based on the one tax return he made public is the case. It is fair to assume that the Trump family will benefit by more than $5 billion personally overt he next 10 years or so. Hypothesis: Donald Trump, as president of the United States is in a position to approve or veto a bill that will benefit him more than 99.99% of his constituents. Human beings all have a self-serving bias, and ethically and morally aware adults realize this. As a result, if Donald Trump is ethically and mo...