Tom Cahill | May 26, 2016
Donald Trump securing the Republican nomination has come at a high cost to his hotel business.
Trump has run a campaign asking voters to have confidence in a
potential presidency because of his business acumen. However, bookings
at his line of hotels have declined dramatically since the blustery real
estate heir launched his campaign for the presidency.
According to data from Hipmunk, Trump’s hotel bookings have dropped by an average of 59 percent compared
to the last year, almost directly in line with when he entered the race
and began attracting international attention for his racist and sexist
remarks on the campaign trail. Meanwhile, other hotels saw a rise in
sales compared to last year, showing this is not merely part of an
industry-wide trend.
Trump’s luxury hotels, particularly in New York and Las Vegas, are
seeing steep declines in reservations when comparing the first quarter
of 2016 to the first quarter of 2015.
Hipmunk’s data showed that in the first quarter of 2015, Trump hotels
held 1.7 percent of all hotel bookings in the cities that house them.
But in the first quarter of 2016, that number dropped to just 0.7
percent of all hotel bookings. While that may not sound like much, the
decline becomes much more apparent in the below graph:
In June, when Trump began his campaign with a simultaneous slight denigrating virtually all Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, Latino groups called for a boycott of all of Trump’s businesses, which continues today. While Trump boasts about the notoriety of his brand, many have come to view his brand as synonymous with racism, sexism, Islamophobia, and hatred.
As the billionaire continues his march as the Republican presidential
nominee toward the November general election, his businesses may
continue their sharp decline.
Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific
Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and
environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com.
MMFA
During a press conference in advance of Donald Trump's energy speech at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference on May 26, Inside Energy reporter Leigh Paterson asked Donald Trump about his pledge to restore coal mining jobs:
LEIGH PATERSON (Inside
Energy reporter): Mr. Trump, you've said multiple times that you
would bring coal mining jobs back. And I'm a reporter in Wyoming, the
largest coal --
DONALD TRUMP: I know. I see it. By far. I was very impressed.
PATERSON: So but, one of the main factors those jobs are going away
and the mines are closing is because of low natural gas prices. Poor
decision making by coal companies.
TRUMP: And by government.
PATERSON: And also because of slowing international demand. So do you
believe you have power as the president to actually bring those jobs
back?
TRUMP: I do. Because I think ultimately coal will be very inexpensive
and it's got to get -- you got to get rid of some of the regulations. I
spoke to some of the mine owners, and they were surrounded by some
of their miners. And they were showing me some of the regulations where
it is on a daily basis going in checking, checking, checking. And they
have people that do nothing but deal with regulators and it is out of
control. It's gotten out of control.
PATERSON: And what would you do about those market forces?
TRUMP: Well, the market forces are going to be whatever they are. You
know, all I can do is free up the coal which I'm going to totally
do. Get the companies back to work, market forces, that's something I
don't want to get involved in, that's a beautiful -- to me a market
force is a beautiful force.
TPM
A Deseret News op-ed penned by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) explaining why
he was refusing to consider President Obama's Supreme Court nominee
Merrick Garland after meeting him was taken down from the news site a
few hours after it was published. Hatch has previously said Obama's
nominee should not get a hearing or a vote, but the op-ed, titled "My
meeting with Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland" (per its Google webcached version) went up before his meeting with Garland even occurred.
A spokesperson for Hatch refused to tell the Washington Post when the senator was scheduled to meet with Garland.
“Senator Hatch has made clear from the beginning that he intends to
meet with Judge Garland out of respect for their longtime friendship,”
the spokesperson, J.P. Freire, said. “He looks forward to their meeting
and the opportunity to explain his position on the current Supreme Court
vacancy.”
Paul Edwards, executive editor of the Deseret News, called the
publication of the op-ed an "unfortunate error" in statement emailed to
TPM.
"This morning, the Deseret News website mistakenly published a draft
of an op-ed from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch explaining his position on the
Supreme Court vacancy," Edwards said. "The electronic publication of
this version, awaiting edits from the Senator following his meeting with
Judge Garland, was inadvertent."
Garland -- a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
-- has met with more than a dozen GOP senators, at least one of whom
was willing to break with party line and say he deserved to go through
the typical consideration process. The Republicans on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, on which Hatch sits, have pledged to refuse to give
any nominee of Obama's a hearing, because, they say, the successor to
the late Justice Antonin Scalia should be picked by the next president.
Coincidentally, days before Obama announced Garland as his selection, Hatch said the President wouldn't nominate a "moderate" like Garland, whom Hatch called a "fine man."
In the op-ed that was taken down Thursday, Hatch continued his praise
for Garland, while reiterating his claim that the blockade was actually
benefitting the appeals court judge.
"[H]olding the confirmation process amid the clamor and commotion of
the current presidential election would thrust Judge Garland into a
punishing political gauntlet that is below the dignity of a Supreme
Court nominee," Hatch wrote. "Because I care for Judge Garland
personally and want to maintain the integrity of the Supreme Court, I
believe the Senate is right to fill the current vacancy after the
political season has ended."
Update: This story has been updated to include a statement from Paul Edwards, the executive editor of the Deseret News.
NEWSWEEK
The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a startling report on the state of the government’s information technology infrastructure on Wednesday.
According to the report, the Department of Defense (DOD) “coordinates
the operational functions of the United States’ nuclear forces, such as
intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers, and tanker support
aircrafts” with a 1970s computer system that uses 8-inch floppy disks.
The
total amount that the government requested for information technology
services in 2017 is $89 billion. The government plans to spend the vast
majority of this IT budget on operations and maintenance, the report
says.
Keeping up old systems, it seems, is getting more and more
expensive. Even as the overall budget for IT systems in government is
rising, the amount of money being spent on upgrading systems is
declining, down $7.3 billion from 2010, according to the GAO report. The
rest is being spent on ancient relics that still power important
systems.
In some cases, agencies have been forced to hire retired employees to maintain systems that are decades out of date.
At
the Department of the Treasury, for instance, the Individual Master
File, the “authoritative data source for individual taxpayers where
accounts are updated, taxes are assessed, and refunds are generated,”
was programmed to run in assembly language, an expensive, hard to
maintain programming language that runs on an IBM mainframe.
The
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) tracks “claims filed by veterans for
benefits, eligibility, and dates of death,” using COBOL, a computer
language several decades beyond its prime.
While the DOD is
planning to upgrade the system that uses floppy disks by the end of
2017, both the Treasury and the VA don’t have any plans to replace their
systems, which means more maintenance costs in the long run, the report
says.
The report recommends that Office of Budget Management call
on individual agencies to identify and prioritize legacy information
systems that are in need of replacement or modernization.
Last Updated on May 16, 2016
There’s a reason Donald Trump is refusing to release his taxes, and it’s not just because of an ongoing audit at the IRS.
Recently it has just been discovered
that Trump, in an effort to show the world how rich he is, valued one
of his properties at “more than $50 million,” yet his attorneys, for tax
purposes, tried to argue that it is really only worth $1.35
million. The property in question, The Trump National Golf Club in
Westchester County, New York, is a sprawling 147-acre private club with
manicured lawns, stone bridges, and has a 101-foot waterfall.
If Trump’s attorneys are legitimately trying to value the property
correctly, then that means Trump lied on his candidate disclosure form.
But, here’s the thing: chances are what’s really happening is that
Trump is drastically undervaluing the property in order to not pay his
fair share of taxes on the property. Either way, he’s lying.
Here’s what we know: Trump bought the property for
$8 million in a foreclosure sale and then immediately spent $45 million
to build an 18-hole golf course, as well as a 75,000-square-foot
clubhouse. Those improvements are quite substantial. That begs the
question then, how on earth would Trump’s tax assessment decrease from
the purchase price even with all of those upgrades?
That’s exactly what the town of Ossining is trying to figure out. Dana Levenberg, the town supervisor, says this is hurting their town’s revenues.
“Trump says he represents the little guy, but the little guy is going to have to pay his taxes for him here in Ossining.”
If Trump gets his way then that means he would be cutting his tax burden by 90 percent, dumping the burden on everyone else.
Further investigative research reveals that Trump’s lawyers are
taking the same approach at Trump’s other properties around the country,
in an attempt to limit how much taxes the billionaire actually pays.
Everyone is well aware of the loopholes that currently exist in
the complicated environment of tax policy in the United States but this
is something entirely different. On one hand, Trump is publicly boasting
about how rich he is, and how much his properties are worth, but on the
other hand, is trying to say they’re worth just a fraction of that when
it comes time to pay Uncle Sam. And – it’s just wrong.
No wonder Trump is the only presidential candidate since 1976 to not release his tax returns. It all makes sense now.
