Billionaires Benefiting from a Tax Break to Help the Poor, Congress Investigates

propublica.org

30 points·heavyset_go··5 comments

I’m a partner in an OZ Fund and we created the OZ Score to help measure the impact in these communities. http://www.oz-score.com

Would love to talk with Congress about this.

Funds website is http://www.activatedcapital.com

Hopefully all those professed haters of "trickle down Reganomics" will learn to equally distrust tax-break philanthropy.

Don't subsidize these developments, give the residents a good enough UBI so the demand alone justifies them.

Unspoken premise being accepted: That the professed purpose (helping the poor) was the actual purpose. Just wanted that noted.

Disagree. That premise was explicitly spoken (that it would help the poor, that was a figleaf by the people pushing this), and it wasn't accepted by very many people, other than some rich people who thought they'd use it. At the time it was passed it was widely said to be likely to be a boondogle that would not make many real improvements.

They left it to governors to choose them, and allow anyone to invest in them.

And for existing property owners within those areas, eh, there is no tax event until a property is sold, unless somehow using mark to market accounting for real estate. Now they’re deferring the tax event for 10 years.

Wealthy were always going to benefit from this obviously?

Many countries have free trade zones with similar characteristics. The whole point is to increase transactions themselves, if your country can only gain consensus by selling something as “poor people, jobs numbers” that has nothing to do with what’s written in the law and the utility of what’s written.

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