Years ago, a Texas legislator who was occasionally known to take lobbyists’ cash in exchange for a vote, explained his ethical framework as opportunistic: “I seen my chances, and I took ’em.”
Likewise, such hustlers as Dan Gilbert (the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans), Michael Milken (the disgraced Wall Street finagler), Stephen Ross (a Florida real estate magnate and owner of the Miami Dolphins), and Jeff Vinik (a Tampa developer of luxury properties) have seen opportunistic chances in Donald Trump’s program of Opportunity Zone tax breaks — and grabbed them. The new tax law was trumpeted as a channel for funneling new investments into poor communities. But the billionaires — all of whom happen to be Trump’s buddies — jumped on it like chickens on a cricket.
They devoured the poor people’s tax subsidy to underwrite luxury projects they were already developing. To see two textbook cases of how plutocrats rig the system, first, consider Kevin Plank’s scam in Baltimore. He’s the billionaire owner of the sports apparel outfit Under Armour. He was struggling to market a track of vacant downtown land called Port Covington as an upscale address, and then he discovered Trump’s new tax break. But alas, Plank’s tract was not in a low-income zone, so it didn’t qualify.