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| Treasury Secretary Mnuchin |
Writing about "Hyper-Local" news nearly always requires perspectives and different angles on the stories posted here. Images selected for insertion are intended to make visual impacts of editorial content by sight.
They send a message. Now some numbers:
The top 0.1%, who make more than $3.4 million a year, made out with $193,380.
The top 1% of income earners made out with $51,140.
Average Americans made out with $1,610
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Follow along if you can . . . It's not meant to-be-easy. Somehow readers of this blog need to do more work to connect-the-dots when information, comments, and opinions are presented side-by-side. For example, why this opening image with one guy gesturing on the left?
It's too early to get puzzled, but if you know about Mnuchin to start with, there's more from the federal level directly impacting a city like Mesa, its mayor, more especially Opportunity Zones (Mesa has 11 if you didn't know that before), state and local sales and property taxes, commercial real estate, income inequality and what might help explain the crisis in affordable housing here. We're going to bounce back-and-forth and forward fairly fast - and finally get to what is featured in a post on this blog yesterday.
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Distressed Entire Downtown Mesa Has Been Bought (Just In Case You Didn't Know)
Your MesaZona blogger has been saying this all along since 2017. Now you can hear that fact directly from Caliber's CEO Chris Loeffler right here and right now in 4 minutes.They started out flipping houses and now they've bought an entire downtown: Mesa.REAL ESTATE PRIVATE EQUITYMONOPOLY JOCKSREAL ESTATE SYNDICATION
The neglected and distressed downtown Mesa had turned into an Opportunity Zone for private wealth-creation.
Worsley did this in public office.
Mesa Mayor John Giles does this also from the time he filled in the unexpired term in 2014 for former mayor Scott Smith. Giles is now serving his first elected 4-year term
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| Featured Speaker: Mesa Mayor John Giles |
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Reference: The Tax Law’s Big Winner Is the Millionaire CEO
Cutting the top marginal rate was always going to help the wealthy the most.
By Joe Light
Bloomberg News 12 April 2019
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< Here's a 7-year projection for 2025 from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
New Tax Law Is Fundamentally Flawed and Will Require Basic Restructuring
UPDATED August 14, 2018
The major tax legislation enacted last December will cost approximately $1.5 trillion over the next decade and deliver windfall gains to wealthy households and profitable corporations, further widening the gap between those at the top of the income ladder and the rest of the nation . . .
Note the income groups, the percentage change in after-tax income, and the average estimated changes.
From the figure first presented at the start of this post for the top 0.1% $193,380 is higher, $252,300.
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BOTTOM LINE
Mnuchin and others in the Trump administration pledged that the tax law wouldn’t benefit the wealthy, but that promise was doomed from the start
BLOGGER NOTES:
< An image taken from Twitter of Mesa Mayor John Giles (at center) in Washington DC having a talk with Steve Mnuchin, the U.S. Secretary of The Treasury a couple of months ago.
A couple of years earlier at a U.S. Mayors Conference, Giles stated that except for an aircraft carrier, you get everything from cities. That's a paraphrase, but it certainly looks that things have changed.
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There’s a particular type of rich person, probably living somewhere in Florida, Texas, or another low-tax state like Arizona who did even better. This person runs his own company or companies, likely in the real estate business.
He got his first windfall from the new tax law back in 2017, before it even passed. As Republicans floated their proposal for a massive cut to the corporate tax rate, from 35 percent to 21 percent, investors began buying corporate shares in anticipation of its passing, says Todd Castagno, an analyst for Morgan Stanley.
Our hypothetical rich person’s businesses are probably in commercial real estate.
Those are most often structured as pass-throughs, such as LLCs or other partnerships, which are taxed not at the corporate level but at their owners’ marginal tax rate, and the new law lets their owners shield 20 percent of their business income from any taxes at all. This deduction was intended to benefit small businesses. Congress blocked high-income owners of some service providers from taking the break in most cases, including lawyers, doctors, and athletes.
But lawmakers gave it to commercial real estate developers regardless of income.
Real estate dodged other bullets, too.
For most businesses, Congress killed so-called like-kind exchanges, which let sellers of certain property such as machinery or artwork avoid capital-gains taxes so long as they reinvested the proceeds in similar property.
But the provision was preserved for real estate. If our rich person invests in property in a “qualified opportunity zone,” QOZ a designation created by the new tax law to encourage investment in low-income areas, he’ll be able to avoid some capital-gains taxes and defer the rest for years. Many opportunity zones are indeed in low-income areas, but others include fast-gentrifying neighborhoods . . .where the developer stands to make a much larger return.
For a lot of accountants, the law has been a real godsend precisely because it’s so complicated.
Take state and local income and property taxes: SALT* (see below for explanation)
The new law capped the amount of those that Americans can deduct from their federal taxes at $10,000 a year—that’s why the tax winner probably lives in or is planning to move to a low- or no-tax state such as Texas or Florida or Arizona, where the
state and local tax (SALT) cap matters less.
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“At the end of the day, when your central policy calls for lowering maximum rates, it’s not going to be easy not to benefit rich people,” says Trier. “
It’s just a fact.”
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*About SALT State and Local Income and Property Taxes
Are Individuals Moving to States With Little to No Income Tax?
Blogger Note: The excerpts inserted below are taken from City Data three years ago, that includes shows interactive infographic Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data.
It can help you understand all the recent reports that Maricopa County and the City of Mesa are growing fast - some of the fastest growth in the entire United States.
The maps, of course, do not prove causation or correlation. That’s up to the statisticians, or really, the individual evaluating the evidence.
With that said, what is the general connection between income tax burden per household and net income migration?
R.T. Young, Ph.D. Business Economics
Are individuals moving from higher tax states to lower tax states?
The hotly-debated issue has two components:
First, how big is the movement of individuals between states? Is the shift something worth worrying about?
Second, could taxes be a possible explanation for the movement of individuals from one state to another? In particular, is income tax a major culprit?
Here’s what the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data looks like on these two questions.
(As a note for the migration data, the data are essentially a matching of tax returns across time – for instance, an individual files in, say, Wyoming in 2008 and then files in New York in 2009.)
First, the following animated GIF shows the shift of individuals by county since 1997 across the United States. The color represents whether a given county was a net gainer or loser of migration income, with the darker the red representing a bigger net loser of migration income and the darker the green a bigger gainer in net migration income.
Besides the shift from the West Coast and northeastern portions of the United States to the Mountain West and South, it’s a little difficult to tell exactly where the geographic losers are. Here are the animated GIFs broken down by a more zoomed geography.
The western United States is below. From this, it’s pretty clear individuals have been consistently shifting away from southern California. In fact, for most of the years, the vast majority of the counties in the Golden State have experienced a net decrease in income migration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a good deal of the shift from southern California has gone to neighboring counties in neighboring states.
Overall, and no doubt unsurprisingly, the IRS data show that about $20 billion in income, or about $100 billion in wealth, shifts between states each year. The shifting slowed down during the recent recession, and has since been on a strong growth path. In terms of magnitude, the $20 billion in income represents about 0.2 percent of total expected income in the U.S. for 2013. The $100 billion in wealth also represents about 0.2 percent of the total wealth of businesses and individuals living in the U.S.
With the shift in income established, the second question is – how does the net income migration connect with tax burden by state?
Where is Arizona? Take a look
http://www.city-data.com/blog/135-individuals-moving-states-little-income-tax/
The neglected and distressed downtown Mesa had turned into an Opportunity Zone for private wealth-creation. 
There seems to be some urgency from Caliber to start a blitz in public relations that only gets a quick mention about "a passing window", despite a feverish push from developers, accountants and law firms, investors are hesitating before jumping into Opportunity Zone funds, according to wealth advisers. As we know now here in Downtown Mesa there wasn’t “much time” for “extra due diligence” on the Opportunity Zone funds, and unless someone else wants to state otherwise, the amount of capital closed so far is small.
