Back in July 2014, in an episode in which he lamented the Wealth Gap in America” (which has resulted in the richest one percent of Americans controlling 20 percent of annual income), Oliver said, “At this point the rich are just running up the score…What sets America apart is that we are actively introducing policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy,” such as tax cuts and loopholes like trusts.

So it’s a little surprising to discover that just months before, Oliver had a tax attorney set up two revocable trusts, one for him and one for his wife, to hide the couple’s purchase of a $9.5 million Manhattan penthouse. Then he used a tax loophole created by Donald Trump himself back in the 1970s, when the current president was merely a prominent New York real estate developer and aspiring celebrity author.

The loophole in question is the banally named “421-a” tax dodge, which was recently attacked in a Daily News op-ed written by two New York state Democrats, one a senator and the other an assemblyman. They said that the original 421-a tax exemption was “designed to encourage new development in locations that were vacant or underutilized,” but that Trump wanted to use it in 1980 when he bought Bonwit Teller in midtown Manhattan. The plan was to tear it down and build Trump Tower, which would mix office space and luxury condos.

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Meanwhile, Oliver, a prominent member of the pampered class who argues for closing the wealth gap, turns out to have his nose as deeply in the tax trough as the Wall Street financiers and corporations he criticizes on his show.

Now that’s a joke.

Nice try. Your character assasins tried this exact same tactic on Jon Stewart. Probably where they got the idea.

Putting your family's assets in a Trust isn't "hiding" them. It's not hidden from anyone. It's what wealthy people do so those assets can't be seized by creditors or lost to a lawsuit. When your job is shaming right wing idiots on TV you can expect lawsuits, as your thin-skinned whining little bitch Trump demonstrated when he tried to sue Bill Maher for joking that Trumps dad was an orangutan.

Oh and Trump "created" a law in the 1970s? How does a civilian "create" a law?

More "fake news" from the people who do it best.

published Thursday, Trump said he believed in his proposed tax cuts even if they cause short-term deficits because they would stimulate growth, an action he characterized as "priming the pump."
He went on to say he believed he created this particular phrasing.
"Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just … I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good."

A Great Selling Point’

It is easy to understand why the tax breaks were so important to a developer like Mr. Trump.

During a building’s two- to three-year construction phase, when there is no rental or sales money coming in, a 421-a tax abatement can save a developer millions of dollars in taxes, because the property is taxed at the rate in effect before improvements are made. Once a building is completed and its apartments are sold, the benefits accrue to the buyers, significantly lowering taxes and making the apartments more appealing.

In the 2004 offering plan for a new two-bedroom penthouse at 120 Riverside Boulevard in the Trump Place-Riverside South development, which stretches from 59th Street to 72nd Street on Manhattan’s West Side, the estimated first-year property taxes were $617 because of the building’s 421-a tax abatement. Without the subsidy, the taxes on the apartment, which was listed at $1.6 million in 2004, would have been $32,916.

“It was a great selling point,” said Charles P. Reiss, a retired executive vice president for development at the Trump Organization. “For condos, the monthly fee was greatly reduced.”

The benefit declines over time, with the apartment owner paying full taxes after 10 years.

After winning the court battle over Trump Tower, Mr. Trump received 421-a tax benefits from the Koch administration worth $20.8 million for his Trump Plaza and Trump Palace projects.

During the 1990s and into the 2000s, Mr. Trump built a number of New York projects without taxpayer subsidies. But he continued to chase benefits, large — and small.

Trump didn't create the law but he sure as hell used it to get tax deferments just like John Oliver and for the record both of them are screwing over the taxpayers of NY with this dodge. So the question becomes, is one worse than the other based solely on the amount of money they managed to screw someone else out of?

I'll worry about what John Oliver does when he gets to the White House and starts running a money laundering operation out of there on behalf of the Kremlin.

Which person in this photo is laughing anyway even though he's clearly not in on the joke.

That whole article is just so full of howlers and backwards logic it's laughable that anyone would fall for that ideological tripe.

And indeed, while it’s technically true that tax laws are generally determined by legislatures, it’s only the wealthiest people who can fully take advantage of the complexities of the tax code via high-priced attorneys and accountants.

Ironically, one person who seems to be personally aware of this fact is John Oliver.

As former Salon writer Ken Silverstein reported for the Observer on Wednesday, Oliver and his wife, Kate Norley Oliver, appear to have used several property tax loopholes, that combined together, allow them to pay an effective rate of 0.25 percent on a penthouse condominium they purchased in October 2015 for $9.5 million.

Using a complicated system involving dual revocable trusts, a shell corporation named for their dog and a now-expired New York City tax law called the 421a exemption, Oliver and his wife managed to lower their condo’s tax assessment to just $607,000 in 2015, according to the real estate website Zillow.

As it happens, the 421a loophole for luxury properties was opened by Donald Trump in 1984 when he successfully sued the city to force it to make his high-rise Trump Tower development eligible for a tax benefit that was originally designed to encourage real estate firms to build single-family homes.

According to the Community Service Society, a New York City-based nonprofit that advocates for economic policies to reduce income inequality, the 421a exemption was costing the city more than $1 billion annually while providing essentially no stimulation to the local economy when it expired at the end of 2015.

“If the billion dollars a year expended on 421a were used to fund housing vouchers similar to Section 8, it would provide homes for 100,000 of the city’s poorest families,” the society noted in a May 2015 report.

Wealthy interests in the city are now pushing for the state of New York to bring the loophole back from the dead this year. They have not yet achieved their goal but, as Oliver said in another context, “you would think in a democracy, policies that benefit very few people at the expense of very many would not be able to succeed. But they have.”

Oliver’s actions may not be the “scam” that Silverstein portrays them to be but they nonetheless do appear to contravene the comic’s proclaimed beliefs.

“Inequality is a bit like cinnamon,” Oliver said in his 2014 segment. “You definitely want a little bit of it to spice life up a bit, but too much of it can be very dangerous. And make no mistake, we are at cinnamon-dangerous levels right now.”

Salon reached out to Avalon Management, the talent agency that represents Oliver, for comment but has not received a response.

Oliver’s fans may say that his actions don’t matter since he’s not a politician or a journalist. That’s true on the former but concerning the latter, to dismiss Oliver’s heavily researched and informative rants as nothing more than tomfoolery doesn’t do them justice.

I'm looking forward to John Oliver being prosecuted for child porn and child molestation.

I'm looking forward to John Oliver being prosecuted for child porn and child molestation.

Do you have any proof to back up that insinuation/accusation?