David Lichtenstein Quotes
Perhaps the secret to making a billion dollars in real estate is that there is no secret.
Lichtenstein, David. "The Secret to Making a Billion Dollars in Real Estate." HuffPost, AOL Inc., 14 Nov. 2016.
Although England had benefitted more from the industrial revolution than most nations, the English Aristocracy and its intelligencia saw business as inherently corrupt with minimal ethical standards and almost no transparency. See {629121} for a Christian religious version of this secular quotation.
This is a very important economic-political quotation. One conservative mantra in the 20th and 21st centuries was that business growth and development will be spurred by tax cuts in the marginal tax rate that the businessperson would have to pay. “Marginal” means the additional tax for each additional dollar of income. However, the development and growth of most businesses, especially the entrepreneurial ones that tend to create the most new high wage jobs. Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Thomas Watson Jr. and other creators of great business enterprises, in general do not even consider their potential profit as the most important reward. They are almost always on a mission to change the way people function in the world. They generally want to make money but the driving factor is really the change in society that they will produce. While Gates and other great business creators do not change their business behavior on the bases of marginal tax rates (or any other kind to tax rates for the matter), the 2nd and 3rd generation of business manager who takes over existing companies is motivated in great part by marginal tax rates. Summers and many others argue that not only are the best jobs created by those who are unmotivated by tax rates, but they are the same businesses that tend to produce most of the great innovations of society. Therefore, find other ways to incentivize the entrepreneurs rathefr than marginal tax rate policy.
Trump as a business man was notorious for setting up business deals where his partners would put up the money. If the enterprise failed the partners were at risk and lost their money while either did not or lost very little. If money was made, however, he took a large share. He not only did this many times but actually admitted it and bragged about his ability to do that. Incredibly enough he even extended this technique to his charity giving. The vast majority of the money he did good things with through his foundation came from other people. There were many years where he gave not a penny to his own foundation, but gave away and took the credit for what was done with other people’s money. The recipients of the foundations grants mostly assumed that Trump was being generous with his own money, and he never disabused them.
David Lichtenstein is an American billionaire entrepreneur and real estate investor. He is the founder and CEO of The Lightstone Group, which he founded in 1988. During the early years of the Lightstone Group, Lichtenstein focused on investing in multifamily properties. He rapidly grew his portfolio in the 1990s, before diversifying his portfolio and moving into retail. Lichtenstein in 2003 acquired Prime Retail for $638 million, seen as one of the largest retail purchases in United States at the time.
