Kevin D. Williamson provides a guide to Donald Trump’s four bankruptcies:

Trump has a peculiar way of speaking about bankruptcy: He has a deep aversion to the word itself. He speaks of “putting a company into a chapter” without ever answering the implicit question: “Chapter of what? Moby-Dick?” The answer, of course, is the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, to which Trump has taken recourse at least four times over the course of his business career. The chapter in question is the famous Chapter 11, which applies to business bankruptcies. Trump proudly insists that he never has had recourse to Chapter 13, the personal bankruptcy code. This is his apparent justification for saying that he’s never been bankrupt. But of course one of the purposes of Chapter 11 bankruptcy is to keep men such as Donald Trump out of Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

Trump’s first bankruptcy was in 1991 after he borrowed a stupidly irresponsible amount of money to finance that monument to excruciatingly bad taste known as the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Trump is such a good manager that the casino’s slot machines began failing during its first week of business. Never one to let reality stand in the way of his confidence, Trump had financed the $1 billion project largely with junk bonds, which meant very high interest payments. Trump did not make enough money to meet his interest payment and so was forced into bankruptcy. His ownership of the casino was diluted, and he ended up having to give back 500 slot machines to the company that had provided them.

Trump himself was on the hook for nearly $1 billion in the deal, according to the New York Times, a sum that exceeded his net worth. He was forced to sell a fair amount of his personal property, including a yacht, as well as the failing air-shuttle service he’d been attempting to launch for some time. As Boston bankruptcy attorney Ted Connolly put it, Trump used the bankruptcy proceedings to negotiate away his personal liabilities while leaving the business saddled with debt. Unsurprisingly, the casino endured further financial problems, including bankruptcy. Trump’s ownership stake was diluted steadily, and he eventually was removed from the board. By the time of the casino’s most recent bankruptcy — which is to say, the bankruptcy it currently operates in — Trump could plausibly say that it wasn’t really his business any more, in spite of the fact that his name and face are all over it.

Trump’s second bankruptcy came with his acquisition of New York City’s Plaza Hotel. The great dealmaker did essentially the same thing with the Plaza that he had done with the Taj Mahal: He borrowed too much money, at rates he could not afford. And in much the same way that he has contemplated putting his abortion-loving sister on the Supreme Court, he made his then-wife, Ivana, president of the Plaza. Once again, Trump was unable to make his debt-service payments. Once again, he lost much of his ownership stake — 49 percent went to Citibank — and, once again, he found himself having to run for the doors as parties with deeper pockets and more managerial acumen took over to clean up his mess. In the case of the Plaza, that was CDL Hotels International, of Singapore, and Prince Walid bin Talal, of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi prince laments that he was twice forced to “bail out” Donald Trump, whom he describes as a “disgrace to the United States.”

In 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a holding company for various Trump properties including the Taj Mahal and a riverboat-gambling company in Gary, Ind., went into bankruptcy, having acquired $1.8 billion in debt while raising only $130 million through an initial public stock offering. Same story: Trump had borrowed too much money, at a rate he could not afford (15 percent, in fact, which lets you know how credit-worthy the market deems Trump to be), and once again he was obliged to give up most of his ownership stake.

Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts was reorganized as Trump Entertainment Resorts . . . which promptly went bankrupt, filing for Chapter 11 protection in 2009. (That’s right: Trump, who wants to be president of these United States, was in bankruptcy that recently.) Too much debt at an interest rate that he couldn’t afford to pay? Check. Loss of ownership? Check. Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, both resigned from the board just before the bankruptcy filing, inviting unkind rodential-nautical metaphors.

It is no wonder that he’s had his greatest success renting his name to Macy’s and pretending to run a business on television rather than actually running a business.

So, those are the bankruptcies about which Donald Trump is lying. Trump also is lying about self-funding his campaign: Like any other politician, most of his money comes from donors. That famous fund-raising for veterans? The money is going into Trump’s personal foundation.

Trump has repeatedly failed his business partners and lied about it. He has lied about self-funding his campaign. He has lied to his wives and his family. Given that he received a low-risk draft status because of a health condition that he does not have, he almost certainly lied to the military he seeks to command.

The thing about habitual liars is, they lie habitually.

If you’re voting for Trump because you think he’s a straight shooter, you’re a bigger sucker than those chumps losing money on both sides of the table in Atlantic City.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431420/donald-trumps-2016-debate-lies-he-went-bankrupt

My favorite online meteorologist, Mike Smith, veers from weather:

We’ve heard a lot recently about the evils of “the rich” or the “1%.” That is not an accurate description of the problem. I believe there is an important distinction to be made depending on how the person becomes “rich.”

Here’s an example: the late Walt Disney (and, to a lesser extent, his brother Roy) built the Walt Disney Company with a vision of providing wholesome family entertainment. After nearly going bankrupt several times, they succeeded. Given the inflation since Walt passed away in 1966, in today’s dollars he would be a billionaire many times over. And, that is just fine with me. Walt risked his money. No one was forced to buy a ticket to “Mary Poppins” or to Disneyland. He succeeded because he created entertainment that people voluntarily wanted to purchase. He also created thousands of good-paying jobs.

At the time of Walt’s 1966 death, he was making a salary of $312,000 per year. In today’s dollars, that would be a salary of $2,243,000 per year. That seems fine to me considering the company was built on his ideas and his risk. Of course, Walt was building great wealth via the 28% of the company he still owned at the time of his death and, again, that is just fine with me.

Now, consider the current CEO of Disney, Robert Iger. He makes $43,490,567 per year of which more than $24 million is cash payments (rest in stock, airplane, etc.). His cash compensation is roughly 11 times Walt’s. He was not one of the founders of the company and he is largely insulated from personal catastrophic loss (through insurance, not having to personally guarantee loans, etc.). Disney was recently in the news for replacing U.S. computer programmers with foreign workers. In fact, per their public disclosures, six Disney executives are currently making more than Walt would be after converting his final salary to 2016 dollars.

Let me be clear: I am not passing judgment as to whether Mr. Iger earns his salary or not. That is for Disney’s directors or stockholders to decide. They may be pleased the company is saving money by switching to non-citizen programmers.

But, from my personal point of view, American society gains much more from Walts than from Roberts. The point of this posting is to explain that railing against “the rich” – without differentiating — is a very bad idea. From mine, and most economists’ perspective, there are “good rich” and “bad rich.” The illustration below demonstrates my point.

One of the (many) reasons this blog is so critical of Al Gore is that he has gotten very rich (with a gigantic personal carbon footprint) almost entirely as a rent seeker by using exaggerated science. The fact that, in 2013, he made $100 million selling, to Mideast oil interests (!), a TV network almost no one watched was predatory influence-peddling at its worst. There is a lot of rent-seeking in solar and wind energy (extra fees and regulations from government forcing the use of “alternative” energy) with global warming as the excuse. This drives up the costs all of us must pay without adding value (a light bulb needs 100 watts of electricity to illuminate and the bulb doesn’t work any better whether the watts come from cheap coal or expensive solar).From where I sit, many of the problems we have with the U.S. economy is that we have gotten away from free enterprise (capitalism) and morphed into a nasty mix of “crony capitalism,” rent-seeking (the government forcing people to pay unneeded fees, taxes, permits, etc.), and other parasites that subtract rather than add value to the economy.

There is far, far too much of this toxicity in the U.S. economy today and far too little true entrepreneurship and genuine free enterprise. We need to encourage job-creating entrepreneurs and discourage the rent-seekers. If a future Walt Disney should cure cancer by creating a one-dose $50 pill and, in the process, get very rich, that is fine with me! Jobs and tremendous value will also be created along the way. …

I simply wish to clarify that politicians merely railing against, and wanting to tax, “the rich” will not get us anywhere. In fact, it may take a bad situation and make it worse.

Donald Trump added economic value and employs, by one estimate, 22,450 Americans. Trump also got his billions in part through what Smith describes — getting governments to let him take over property by eminent domain without fairly compensating the property owner. The Evil Koch Brothers employ 2,400 Wisconsinites, but liberals consider them bad because they don’t like the Koch Brothers’ politics. Liberals are, of course, wrong.

Bret Stephens:

Last Friday a crane collapsed in lower Manhattan, killing a man named David Wichs. The next day the papers told the story of his life: a Jewish immigrant from Czechoslovakia; a math whiz with a degree from Harvard; a thoughtful neighbor and husband; “the nicest, most trustworthy person that I have known,” according to his boss, Mark Gorton, of Tower Research Capital. Mr. Wichs was just 38 when he died.

I never met Mr. Wichs, but reading about him reminded me of so many people I know in his industry—prodigiously bright and slyly funny, reasonably wealthy but rarely ostentatious, family men of the type who show up at school auctions and United Jewish Appeal dinners. Maybe they voted for Barack Obama the first time, probably not the second. They’re the people who, even now, make American finance the envy of the world.

They’re the most demonized people in America.

That’s the import of Bernie Sanders’s remark, in his debate last week withHillary Clinton, that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.” The senator from Vermont went on to say that “corruption is rampant” in the financial sector, his evidence being that “major bank after major bank has reached multibillion settlements” with the feds.

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Sanders has accused Wall Street of fraud, and it surely won’t be the last. No political or social penalties attach, in today’s America, to the wholesale indictment of this entire industry and the people who work in it. Had another presidential candidate made a similarly damning remark about some other profession—public-school teachers, say, or oil-rig workers—there would have been the usual outcry about false stereotypes, the decline of civility and so on. When Bernie says it about Wall Street there’s a collective shrug, if not nodding agreement.

Some six million people work in financial services in America, according to Commerce Department figures. Take only the securities and investment end of the business, and you’re still talking about 900,000 people, a population that considerably exceeds Vermont’s 626,000. Is Mr. Sanders suggesting that some large proportion of those 900,000 is in on the fraud; that every man among them is a Madoff—including David Wichs? And if they are the criminals he alleges, does he mean to put a few thousand of them behind bars?

Those are questions that ought to be put to Mr. Sanders, and ones his supporters might also want to ask themselves. The strength of the Sanders candidacy is said to lie in the purity of his idealism, especially in contrast to the morally flexible and ideologically ambidextrous candidacy of Mrs. Clinton.

But the reason Mr. Sanders is drawing his big crowds is neither his fanatical sincerity nor his avuncular charm. It’s that he’s preaching class hatred to people besotted by the politics of envy. Barack Obama, running for president eight years ago, famously suggested to Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher that “when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.”

Mr. Sanders dispenses with the niceties. “I do not have millionaire or billionaire friends,” he boasts, as if there’s an income ceiling on virtue. That’s telling the 10,100,000 American households with a net worth of at least $1 million (excluding the value of their homes) to buzz off.

It is also telling any intellectually sentient voter that the drift of the modern Democratic Party runs in the same illiberal direction as the Trumpian right, only with a different set of targets. Mr. Sanders thinks Wall Street’s guilt is proved by its capitulation to the demands of a government that could barely prove a single case of banker fraud in court.

Another interpretation is that a government with almost unlimited powers to break, sue, micromanage or otherwise ruin an unpopular institution is not a government banks are eager to fight. The problem with capitalism isn’t that it concentrates excessive economic power in the hands of the few. It’s that it gives political power ever-tastier treats on which to feast. Covering for that weakness is the reason Wall Street plows money into the pockets of pliable Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker—and Mrs. Clinton.

That’s something Mr. Sanders will never understand, being the sort of man whose notion of wisdom is to hold fast to the angry convictions of his adolescence. That may be why he connects with so many younger voters. But it’s also why his moral judgments are so sweeping and juvenile. Wall Street remains one of America’s crowning glories. To insinuate that the people who make it work are swindlers is no less a slur than to tag immigrants as criminals and moochers.

My colleague Holman Jenkins once cracked that some plausible ideas vanish in the presence of thought. I would add that some widespread beliefs vanish in the presence of decency. That goes as much for Bernie Sanders’s economic prejudices as it does for Donald Trump’s ethnic ones, a thought that ought to trouble the placid consciences of this column’s more liberal readers.

Someone should tell Comrade Sanders that according to God and Moses, theft and envy are prohibited.