Levin Report

A Top V.C. Explains How Trumpcare Would Trade Lives for Tax Cuts

Understanding the cruel financial calculus at the heart of the Senate bill.
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By SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images.

The Congressional Budget Office, everyone’s favorite nonpartisan federal scorekeeper, is officially out with its analysis of the Senate’s health-care bill, and the results aren’t pretty. An estimated 22 million people would drop or lose insurance coverage over the next decade, with 15 million becoming uninsured in the first year alone. The bill would cut nearly $800 billion from Medicaid, with coverage losses continuing beyond the C.B.O.’s 10-year reporting window. Premiums would spike for the elderly and the poor, who C.B.O. predicts would simply not purchase insurance at all. Deductibles would skyrocket.

The primary beneficiaries of this scheme, as it has repeatedly been pointed out, would be a small number of high-income households, who would see a gigantic tax cut on the order of $541 billion over the next decade. The nation’s 400 richest families alone would receive tax cuts equal to maintaining Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in Nevada, West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alaska combined.

Republicans like Mike Pence are already excitedly hailing the return to the days of “personal responsibility,” where the government bears no responsibility if somebody with poor personal habits, or lack of foresight, or the irresponsibility to be born with a genetic disorder, happens to get sick. But as Google Ventures partner Ken Norton pointed out in an emotional Twitter thread that went viral Monday, even well-off families like his can face devastating medical tragedies. Norton, a Google veteran and a mainstay of the Silicon Valley circuit since the first dot-com era, shared a story about his late son, Riley, who was born with a preexisting heart condition and died before he turned 12. Norton notes he was lucky to have had great insurance through his employer, and that for the next 11 years after Riley’s birth, nothing was more important to him than keeping his insurance.

“His multiple heart surgeries and hospitalizations rang up more than $3 million in bills, all of which were paid by my insurer ... Who came through my employer and was required to cover me, and could not deny him due to preexisting condition. No annual or lifetime max,” Norton writes. “We focused on giving him a happy life instead of bankruptcy, GoFundMes, or taking second or third jobs that would take us away from him. Even then, our lives were upended. I wanted to start a company, or join a very early stage startup. I could not risk losing coverage. Nor could I purchase it myself due to his preexisting condition. Even the 18 months of COBRA scared the hell out of me. When a family member is this severely sick, even the tiniest chance of going without health coverage is terrifying and means bankruptcy. But here’s the thing: there are no ‘healthy’ and ‘sick’ people. Healthy people can turn into sick people really fucking suddenly.”

Obamacare, he notes, isn’t perfect. But it means that families don’t have to choose between treating life-threatening conditions or going broke; Trumpcare, on the other hand, would send people to an early grave. And here’s the kicker: Norton is one of those people who would benefit from the tax cut Trump is trading lives for, but he doesn’t want it:

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While it presupposes that Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, or anyone in the grand old party cares, rich person to rich person it’s probably one of the few arguments they’d pause to listen to, before deciding tax cuts are more important in the end anyway.

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Legendary hedge fund manager sets his eyes on Big Chocolate

Activist hedge fund manager Dan Loeb is notorious not only for his string of successes, but also for his habit of taking a position in a company and proceeding to tell management precisely what he thinks about them. Among the Third Point founder’s victims are ex-PDL BioPharma C.E.O. Mark McDade, who Loeb excoriated for his “pathological selfishness and poor business judgment”; ex-Dow Chemical C.E.O. Andrew Liveris, who starred in a website launched by Loeb that attacked Liveris’s time at the company; and ex-Star Gas Partners Irik Sevin, who Loeb described as “one of the most dangerous and incompetent executives in America” and who the hedge fund manager told to “Do what you do best: retreat to your waterfront mansion in the Hamptons where you can play tennis and hobnob with your fellow socialites.” The former C.E.O.s of Sotheby’s, Yahoo!, and 7-Eleven, also all know what it’s like to be caught in the hedge fund manager’s crosshairs. All of which is to say, Nestlé SA C.E.O. Mark Schneider has a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Per the Wall Street Journal:

Billionaire activist investor Daniel Loeb’s Third Point LLC hedge fund has taken its largest-ever initial bet on a public company, with a $3.5 billion stake in Nestlé SA piling pressure on the world’s largest packaged-foods company to find ways to accelerate growth. The stake amounts to about 1.25% of Nestlé’s shares. That’s a small investment for the European giant. But it’s an unusually big bet for a U.S. activist fund in Europe, where American investors’ sometimes aggressive approach has had mixed success.

According to Loeb & Co, “Despite having arguably the best positioned portfolio in the consumer packaged goods industry, Nestlé shares have significantly underperformed most of their U.S. and European consumer staples peers on a three year, five year, and ten year total shareholder return basis.” Nestlé, the firm said in its letter to clients announcing the position, has “fallen behind over the past decade” and “has remained stuck in its old ways.” And then in that delightfully Loebian fashion: “It is rare to find a business of Nestlé’s quality with so many avenues for improvement.” Among its prescriptions/demands for change, Third Point wants the company to divest of its stake in L’Oréal SA.

For its part, Nestlé responded by saying it “keeps an open dialogue with all our shareholders” but is “committed to executing its strategy and creating long-term shareholder value.” Godspeed, Mark Schneider.

Surprise: Donald Trump’s 15 percent corporate tax rate doesn’t jibe with reality

We hope it will not surprise you to learn that one of the major pillars of Donald Trump’s tax plan—to slash the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent—is just another bit of unrealistic Trumpian vaporware, according to a brutal Bloomberg analysis that cites such factors as “congressional rules, political concerns and simple arithmetic.”

Although no details of the White House’s plan have emerged since it debuted a one-page, double-spaced, bullet-point outline in April, experts reportedly believe that “a shallower cut is the most likely outcome,“ in the range of 28 percent at best. The rates the president and House Speaker Paul Ryan want are “almost certainly a pipe dream,” says Caplin & Drysdale international tax lawyer David Rosenbloom. “They don’t know how to pay for a cut of that magnitude.” By reducing the rate to 28 percent, which, fun fact, Barack Obama tried to do in 2012, the White House’s claims that the cuts will create jobs and spur economic growth are basically dead on arrival. (Even with deeper cuts, experts have said Team Trump’s prediction of 3 percent growth is less likely than the president relinquishing his stockpile of Just For Men). Not only that, but it would do little to convince large U.S. corporations to stop shifting their profits offshore. Per Bloomberg’s Lynnley Browning:

...setting a 28 percent tax rate would be largely meaningless for more than 150 of the largest U.S. companies, which already paid lower rates than that from 2008 through 2015, according to a recent study. The companies took advantage of features of the tax code that allow for aggressive tax avoidance as well as tax “subsidies,” according to a March 2017 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which gathered data from public disclosures. If Congress does close loopholes to pay for a lower rate, many such breaks would disappear...For multinationals, 28 percent “is not something they’d say, sign me up for that,” said Mark Mazur, a former top tax official in the department. Caplin & Drysdale’s Rosenbloom agreed. “I suspect that a 28 percent rate will please no one,” he said.

Speaking at an event put on by the tax-cut-loving Koch brothers, hedge fund manager Ken Griffin reiterated that a 15 percent rate has a smaller chance of becoming reality than Charles and David funding Hillary Clinton’s third presidential run.

“The bitter truth is we’re not going to see rates as low as those proposed by the administration,” the Citadel LLC founder and Republican said Monday. “We’ve just been through eight years of spending that we’ve never seen before in the history of the country. Our deficits are stunning.”

Maybe a one-year, $35.3 million mortgage for a 4-bedroom apartment wasn’t the best plan

In 2009, one whole year after the financial crisis, Extell Development Co. began work on One57, a luxury tower on West 57th Street that inspired other developers to erect their own buildings along the so-called “Billionaires’ Row,” like 252 East 57th Street, 225 West 57th Street, and 111 West 57th Street, where apartments have sold for as much as $100.5 million. That particular record was set by One57 and now it’s about to set another one: for the most expensive foreclosure ever. Bloomberg reports that Apartment 79, a 6,240-square-foot penthouse that was purchased for $50.9 million in December 2014, is set to hit the auction block on July 19, after its owners defaulted on their $35.3 million mortgage last fall. (Luckily for the owner—a shell company called One57 79 Inc— it probably won’t take long to pack things up, as many of these luxury apartments are simply used to park money, with no one ever moving in).

This is the second One57 apartment whose owners have apparently fallen on hard times this year; in May, a condo on the 56th floor was scheduled to be auctioned on June 14. “This shows that too much leverage is probably not wise,” Extell spokeswoman Anna LaPorte told Bloomberg, in the understatement of the century.

Jamie Dimon gives Travis Kalanick a pep-talk

CNBC reports that J.P. Morgan C.E.O. Jamie Dimon and recently deposed Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick were spotted grabbing lunch and a chat on Sunday in D.C. at Café du Parc, during which “Kalanick seemed somber [and]...at times, it looked as if Kalanick was getting advice and Dimon was consoling him.” Dimon was famously fired from from Citigroup in 1998 by his mentor Sandy Weill before going on to become the long-serving C.E.O. of J.P. Morgan, so the two do have some shared experiences to draw on. Then again, Dimon was shown the door because he wanted to run the company and Weill wasn’t ready to retire, and not because he presided over a corporate den of sexual harassment and sexism, and once wrote a memo that included a line about not being able bang subordinates at a work party and the hashtag FML, so they’re not totally coming from the same place.

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