You're Fired!

 

As many of you are partners or managing partners of small to midsized firms, I doubt you would allow someone to consult on an M&A deal or lead a strategic retreat if said person had declared bankruptcy multiple times and then with a straight face insisted it never happened?

My guess is you would tell them to be careful the door doesn't hit them on the way out.

Now that the Iowa caucuses are history, I want to revisit a political issue that generated an unfathomable amount of headlines considering its degree of preposterousness.

That being the question of why the conservative NewsMax or the GOP for that matter EVEN considered letting one-time bad hair presidential candidate Donald Trump host/moderate one of the televised presidential debates before a decided lack of interest - not to mention participation - prompted him to abandon his latest megalomaniacal platform.

But pulling the plug on this debacle-in-waiting sadly did not come before a respected host of one of the major cable news business programs was on the receiving end of a stern lecture from The Donald on how his company's bankruptcies and restructurings have been misreported for years.

I guess that would depend on your definition of what "is" is, hence my reference in the lead about the need for a Truth-O-Meter.

A personal bankruptcy, perhaps not.

But his companies indeed filed bankruptcy on not one, not two, but on FOUR occasions in 1991, 1992, 2004 and again 2008, the first two of which I covered in a former life.

As a GOP Presidential candidate, he was taken as seriously as the results of a professional wrestling match, although incredibly, he's reportedly still mulling an independent run.

The highlight, if there was one, of his abbreviated initial campaign was to demand that the current occupant of the Oval Office produce his birth certificate, which in between his nearly 90 rounds of golf since taking office and piling up reams of frequent flyer miles to Hawaii, he did.

His solution to help pay down the mind-boggling national debt as well as boost the Social Security Trust Fund?

How about a 14.25 percent one-time tax on those with a net worth over $10 million? That, contends The Donald, will result in $5.7 trillion of new revenue. Hmmm.

And there's no one that comes to mind quicker when I think of someone sensitive to populist concerns than the owner of one of the globe's most ubiquitous and annoying surnames, or one who has appeared in a number of wrestling pay-per-view shows.

In the latest tome, "The America We Deserve," he describes the Internal Revenue Code thus, "Its complexity bleeds off billions of productive hours. Tax rates are too high. Hidden taxes take even more. High property taxes punish people for improving their property."

If someone had a career-long propensity for bending the truth like a recycled Gumby, I doubt you would let him within three area codes of your firm.

Let alone reforming the Tax Code or entertaining a delusional notion of leading the country.

 

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