In today’s episode, Jason Hartman interviews Julio Gonzalez, founder of Engineered Tax Services, a licensed engineering firm that focuses on tax benefits at federal, state, and local levels. Julio shares tax credits associated with investing and real estate at the federal level. They talk about reusing properties like hotels and shopping centers to affordable housing and redistribution centers.

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Welcome to the American monetary associations Podcast, where we explore how monetary policy impacts the real lives of real people. And the action steps necessary to preserve wealth and enhance one’s lifestyle.

Jason Hartman 0:29
It’s my pleasure to welcome Julio Gonzalez to the show. He is the founder of engineered Tax Services. They specialize in helping companies, developers, manufacturers gain tax credit information, they consult on that. And he has a lot of insight information into what the economy’s doing, by nature of doing that, I’m sure. And today, we want to talk about the stimulus packages, the cares Act, the heroes act, let’s kind of dive in to see how that might affect a potential for recovery. Julio, welcome. How are you?

Julio Gonzalez 1:01
I’m good. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Jason Hartman 1:03
It’s good to have you give us a little background as to, you know, maybe just quickly what you do. And you sort of see things early in the economic cycle, if people are buying equipment for manufacturing facility, if they’re going to be developing properties, you know, they’re consulting with you and x asking about tax credits, and what’s available to them. So you’re probably very early in seeing what’s going to happen in the economy. years hence, right?

Julio Gonzalez 1:30
Yeah, there’s no question about it. We do tax credits in the areas of manufacturing, real estate structure infrastructure. So clearly, we are seeing it in progress before the public sees. And certainly, you know, we have a good feel for those economies and how it ultimately impacts our national economy.

Jason Hartman 1:51
Yeah. So given that, what are you seeing, we know that real estate development is booming? I mean, there’s a massive shortage in housing, especially now, with COVID. And then the race riots, people are fleeing high density cities, and they want to move to the suburbs, which can’t blame them. I think they’re making a great decision getting out of the cities. So tons of demand. I mean, it’s maybe counterintuitive, you know, three, four months ago, everybody thought the world was coming to an end. But it’s feels like the complete opposite is happening. What do you think?

Julio Gonzalez 2:21
Yeah. Well, I think there’s been winners and losers in the real estate. I think you’re right. I think people are moving out. And that’s creating a housing shortage. And yeah, obviously, demand. But you know, we have retailers, you know, the big malls, the problem now the hotels are suffering, right. So we have winners and losers. And certainly, you know, we’ll figure out how the losers adapt. And the winners are certainly taken advantage of the changing times for sure. Yeah, definitely.

Jason Hartman 2:49
Do you do you get involved when it comes to tax credits, in a reuse of properties, reuse of retail properties, reuse of hotels, I mean, some of those are trying to turn into residential, I have a buddy of mine that’s doing a deal on a hotel property to turn it into low income housing. You know, those are pretty small homes or condos or governments, you know, to turn hotel rooms into apartments. But do you get involved in that? Do people consult with you on tax credits there? Or is that not a big thing?

Julio Gonzalez 3:20
Yeah. I mean, that’s what they do. And we’re seeing tremendous amounts of hotels shifting to affordable housing, right, small units. And I think that’s something we’re going to see, especially in the big cities, and the regions where, you know, there’s a demand for that, and no demand for hotels, and the hotels are closing foreclosing, and, you know, so what’s the alternative for that kind of product? And it really has been in the affordable housing.

Jason Hartman 3:49
But I can’t imagine that’s going to work very well. I mean, I know there will be some of it. But I just don’t think it’s a big, big trend. You know, I can’t see it that way. And plus, you know, most of these hotels have one of the danger zones that I think people are fleeing from and that’s what I call an elevator. You know, that’s Yeah, that’s a if you’re worried about a virus, you do not want to be in an elevator, that’s for sure. And so typically, a hotel is a high rise or, you know, at least a couple three, four, storeys, you know, four storeys, I guess, would be super common configurations. Yeah. So we’ll see how that goes. What about, you know, retail properties, shopping malls, you know, or just shopping centers?

Julio Gonzalez 4:29
Yeah, the rates really are trying to go into these shopping centers and create distribution centers from them. And, you know, try to redesign them in a way that, you know, we’ve seen distribution be a real winner in the real estate industry, where the malls have been the real loser, but maybe that was coming anyway. Right. You know, maybe that was something that just got accelerated through this pandemic.

Jason Hartman 4:53
Yeah. And I think that’s a good point. A lot of stuff has been accelerated. No question about that. I don’t know. So You know, with a stimulus, you know, with a government program, it always, you know, encourages bad behavior, if you will. And when things started reopening, employers were really struggling to get people to come back to work, because they were actually in many cases making more money sitting at home on the couch than working with it with a bonus stimulus. Right. Or, or they were using it to gamble on Robinhood in the stock market. That’s right. That’s fine, great, crazy stuff. Right. So tell us about the last program and then the possibility of the new stimulus.

Julio Gonzalez 5:30
Yeah, I mean, the cares act was really kind of a temporary band aid of programs that would hopefully get us through, you know, the summer, thinking that by then we would have addressed the virus in a way that maybe we were finding cures, or maybe we were coming up with vaccines or better ways to adjust to it, but that hasn’t, you know, really played out. So, you know, the next step is to have basically the cares to program or the heroes Act, which would, you know, one thing, right, we’re doing the $600, extended vacation of the basically the payments going out. And, you know, the Senate doesn’t want to extend that anymore through the heroes that they feel that 10 million jobs are sitting at home, because they’re getting that extra $600, in benefit to do so. And so if you saw their version of the bill came out yesterday, they said we would compromise, maybe we would do $100, maybe we would do $200 to people under a certain income level. But we certainly weren’t going to extend the $600 to keep 10 million jobs from staying at home.

Jason Hartman 6:37
Right. But what if people can’t go back to work? What if you know, their local government or even their state government has said, you got to stay locked down, then what do people do?

Julio Gonzalez 6:47
Yeah, and certainly the house feels that way and wants to get that $600 extended, and the senate feels it should be something lower than that. I mean, here’s the risk. It’s like, okay, we continue to put this money out, we increase our debt. Right. And I guess that debt, is that a good investment? If we continue to pay that out? Will that ultimately stimulate the economy or produce into a worse economy? And that’s what I think they’re trying to debate right now between the House and Senate.

Jason Hartman 7:15
So with all this debt, and this money creation, I mean, it’s absolutely crazy that it’s like, you know, the government just acts like we can just create funny money out of thin air forever. And, you know, there’s no consequences. Are there consequences? You just alluded to that so?

Julio Gonzalez 7:30
Well, I mean, the consequences, I think, are could be traumatic. I mean, it could be massive inflation, you know, that we follow up with this? And how are we going to pay it? And, you know, we’re paying all this money to interest and debt, you know, how do we pay for other things, infrastructure and other things? I mean, there’s only so much money that comes into the tax system, right to the IRS and Treasury that we pay, right? And if a lot of that money is going strictly to debt, then how do we grow the economy? How do we have other programs? It would be challenging,

Jason Hartman 8:04
but you know, the magic question is, can we defy gravity and just create new fake money forever? And, you know, build roads and give people bailouts and stimulus and, you know, bailout? American Airlines and whatever else we want? I mean, I don’t know. It’s people are asking, where’s all the inflation from, you know, the Great Recession stimulus from now? But I think they’re asking the wrong question. How would it have been differently if they didn’t do that? There certainly is some inflation and in you know, tuition, which that’s a whole nother argument. That’s a complete ripoff. Obviously, health care, you know, food prices are going through the roof. They’re at a five decade high right now. And I’m noticing that, you know, every time I go to the grocery store, you probably I mean, we live near each other. So you might shop at that same Trader Joe’s I shop at on PGA Boulevard, sometimes that’s right,

Julio Gonzalez 8:55
you know, and I was there. And, you know, it used to be $80 for groceries, and now it’s 121 30. You know, it seems like I’m getting kind of the same amount of groceries. So it’s prices are going up aren’t that well, that’s that’s really what impacts, you know, the consumers, right. I mean, the groceries and those kind of costs housing. Right. And so those are big challenges. Right, that we have to ultimately you saw the Tea Party, right, the meadows and the other senators, you know, they’re afraid to put out any more debt. You know, they really are truly scared of the consequences of that and trying to come up with a plan that maybe doesn’t increase the debts but encourages. Yeah, other behavior through credits. Yeah.

Jason Hartman 9:45
Interesting. So you don’t sum it up for us? I mean, where do you think we’re going? Well, you know, do you have any predictions on what what’s coming next?

Julio Gonzalez 9:53
Well, I think, you know, clearly we’ve seen some good signs that some of these vaccines are in trial. Phase Three, phase They’re having some good successful like the heroes AG, they want to put out $1,000,000,000,000.20 5% of that $230 billion is for the vaccine and finding cures. So that’s a big part of it. The other part, bailing out the industries that have been heard the most, some stimulus money going back to the individuals, I think they’re trying to quantify the amounts, find the recovery, right? Because once the virus goes away, you know, I think we would see the economy come back if we don’t go too far into Great Depression, right? If we kind of continue to stabilize and open up and get to a point where the vaccines kind of kick in, and then we can see better days.

Jason Hartman 10:42
And, well, vaccines take a long time. And nobody knows if the vaccine will be safe. Certainly anti vaxxers were out before but I think this one, there’s even even more concern, and also vaccinating 7 billion people. I mean, yeah, that doesn’t happen in a month. Okay. It probably takes, I don’t know, how long does it take to do that to manufacture all those vaccines and administer them? That’s good. That’s gonna take years. I mean, I mean, you’re right. I nobody know. Right? It’s never been done. Right. Right. Yeah. Wow, that’s something, um, anything else you’re seeing that you want to share? Or, you know, maybe share some insights into, because we have a lot of real estate investor listeners, you know, some of the things that developers do in terms of tax credits they get and things like that. I just think that’s pretty fascinating, kind of behind the scenes world, that the typical real estate investor, obviously the typical real estate consumer, they don’t see it, they don’t think much about it. What levels of government are you dealing with? Is it just local or?

Julio Gonzalez 11:45
No, it’s federal, it’s state, and local as well. So like there’s 20 tax credits associated with investing in real estate at the federal level, making a building energy efficient, generates tax credits, making a building, renovated from a place of an old worn out real estate project credits associated with bringing a building back to live a building for making the facade easements better the air rights above the building can be sold. And the buildings with the components within a building can be accelerated based on the premium product that’s placed into a billing center, how

Jason Hartman 12:28
do the air rights create a tax credit?

Julio Gonzalez 12:30
Well, basically, the air rights can be sold so and you can sell them as credits, you can sell them as cash. You see, sometimes people don’t need the credit, so they cash them out. And it’s a great market, right? So you have air rights above you, you’re zoned to go up to eight storeys, but you’re at four storeys, and someone wants to go to add stories, but they don’t have any air rights.

Jason Hartman 12:55
Okay, got it. Got it. So you can sell them to that building. As right. They can build hire. Yeah,

Julio Gonzalez 13:01
that’s right. Okay.

Jason Hartman 13:02
So you said there were 20, though.

Julio Gonzalez 13:04
Yeah, there’s so many. I mean, there’s ways to accelerate depreciation within a building through a cost segregation study. Yeah, I’ve done those. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, we do about 400 a month. So you appreciate those, right. If you make the building energy efficient. One of the credits we’re seeing a lot of now is putting the 5g rooftop antennas up on the buildings. You know, the is this is the government incentivizing 5g for 100%. Right, because their goal is to have the new internet, the new web out there in the next few years in the five carriers really the 18 T’s the Verizon’s of the world are in a desperate race. To get up there. You saw they had two big lawsuits because they said there were 5g everywhere. They weren’t 5g probably nowhere. And so but their FCC licenses require them to be on every rooftop basically. And so that’s a mad dash the property. The problem is they don’t know the property owners, right. And so they’ve been living in the world of big antennas on land, but not hitting on rooftops. And that’s been the big dilemma for them. So yeah, there’s certain tax credits associated with that type of infrastructure, because the government knows that, you know, the automation, and the things that we want to do as a country aren’t available without that 5g web throughout the country.

Jason Hartman 14:20
Yeah, well, that’s interesting. What about the opportunity zone? Are you are you consulting on opportunity zone stuff at all?

Julio Gonzalez 14:27
tremendous? Yeah, we do a lot of that obviously, through the pandemic, we’ve had a little slow down, but obviously the here the cares ag extended the opportunity zone and again, what a wonderful tax program to go into areas that need structures to bring back business and don’t have that infrastructure and and certainly you have some tax gain benefits.

Jason Hartman 14:52
I think they’re gonna have to make that tax benefit even sweeter now, because a lot of those opportunity zones are places where there’s been a lot of civil unrest I mean, I can’t imagine businesses wanting to go into those places that are developers wanting to, you know, anybody wanting anything built there. But you know, I know people will chase tax credits, obviously. But I think before I look at opportunity zone is a pretty complex thing, right. And I interviewed one of the authors of the opportunity zone for the Obama administration on the show before. And you know, you got to be a developer, you’ve got to do improvements, which I think ultimately is just gonna cause gentrification, every government program just backfires. I’m not I’m not very optimistic about government programs doing what they say we’re gonna do. But sure, that’s a philosophical discussion. But But you know, now, I mean, have you seen any projects halted or, or maybe just less interest in stuff because of the civil unrest? And it also a lot of those areas, I would guess would be higher density, too. So there’s the COVID problem, too. What do you think about that

Julio Gonzalez 15:57
post pandemic, the interest just fell off the cliff. I mean, where we were seeing funds and developers, you know, being very proactive, that’s completely halted. We’ve seen projects just stop in the foot tracks. I mean, the pandemic is basically, you know, from what we’re seeing, shut it down.

Jason Hartman 16:16
Oh, wow. So what do you what do you think about that? Is it because, you know, it’s sort of earmarked for areas that would be highly affected, like the migration out of places like that, due to the pandemic, and then the civil unrest?

Julio Gonzalez 16:30
I think that’s a big part of it. And like you said, you know, for that to go, come back, you know, you’re gonna have to greatly sweeten the pie.

Jason Hartman 16:41
Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. Well, good stuff. give out your website and wrap it up with any closing comments you have.

Julio Gonzalez 16:47
Well, appreciate it. Our website is engineered tax services.com. And, you know, we appreciate being on your show, and we’re very thankful for what you do. And let’s continue to get the education out there to help people.

Jason Hartman 17:03
Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Julio Gonzalez 17:05
Oh, my pleasure.

Jason Hartman 17:11
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