The Trump Administration has aggressively teamed up with Big Tech billionaires to diversify their fortunes into "underserved areas" by allowing tax deferment on realized capital gains derived from liquidation of their core investments. This is a massive Public-Private Partnership operation that could push as much as $6 trillion of "unlocked capital" into areas that would be turned upside down, and worse, inundated with Smart City technology designed to create a data extraction extravaganza for years to come.

In short, this is an operation of Big Tech, for Big Tech and by Big Tech, but President Trump has aided and abetted their efforts to manipulate government rules for their own self-interest. Undesired consequences will most certainly follow.

Introduction

When President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 in December 2017, few read or understood the small print authorizing the creation of Opportunity Zones. One year later on December 12, 2018, Trump created and signed an Executive Order titled, Executive Order on Establishing the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, which created a highest-level committee that includes the very top leadership of the Administration: the Secretaries of the Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Energy and Education; the Administrators of the EPA and the Small Business Administration; the Chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and the Council on Environmental Quality and a few other assorted big-wigs.