Probably. Among many other things, he deducted “consulting fees” in the forms of hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to his own family. Others have been prosecuted for this before.
That’s for Trump and Bill Barr to know, and the IRS and NY AG Letitia James to find out.
- That’s what I imagine, too.
- I don’t think he pays less taxes in total that the kid at McD’s, although he certainly pays less in income tax. I’m sure his total taxes a 100 times higher.
Tax codes should be simple and clear to avoid difficult-to-get-to loopholes that only rich can use. Make the loopholes easy-access or close them althogether.
Like others, I’m trying to figure out how the hell the IRS has taken ten years (and counting) on this audit. Unfortunately, I suspect that the Obama administration may have deliberately slow-rolled it, so as not to seem like they were singling out Trump over his birther nonsense.
I don’t care that he spent $70,000 on his hair, but how is that deductible? I have to have haircuts and wear suits for my job, but I can’t deduct the expense.
Well, for the last four years he has used the power of his office to squelch actions taken by the Treasury Department (and every other federal department). This case probably swings back into action if he’s not president in 2021, which is probably yet another reason that he is so determined to cheat his way to a win. He needs desperately to buy time.
This is something else Biden should hammer on. It’s not the tax evasion, or tax minimization, the narrative there is that he’s just being “smart”, nobody pays more taxes than they are legally obliged to. What matters is:
(1) He’s a terrible businessman who has persistently lost money, contrary to the narrative that he’s a financial genius and great negotiator.
(2) He has huge personal loans coming due, which leave him extremely vulnerable to inappropriate influence, and represent an obvious conflict of interest in his handling of economic policy.
(3) His handling of COVID and 200,000 American deaths should be seen not just as incompetence, but also in the context of this massive conflict of interest: his own casino and hotel businesses woulds suffer dramatically if he informed the American people of the known risk, if he implemented and enforced appropriate measures to stop the spread of the virus.
This is exactly the criteria the Republicans have been using to label poor people “freeloaders”. As in… identical. They bitch and moan about the 47% who pay no taxes, that’s Trump.
They refuse to acknowledge that people like illegal immigrants and welfare recipients and the impoverished pay taxes that aren’t Federal Income Taxes, and now you want to defend a pampered rich guy non-tax-payer with those other taxes?
I actually understand how this deduction flies for a tv personality (I think those deductions were taken when he was on that weird show, which also seems to be one of the last things at which he made money).
What I don’t understand is how anyone could pay $2,000 to have their hair look like that?
Terrible businessman indeed.
Successful billionaire businessmen find loopholes for sure, but they still typically have to pay taxes in the millions. Mitt Romney paid only 14% in margin income taxes, but that still amounted to nearly $2 million.
Trump is basically finding ways to get cash and yet still not making profits at the same time. What’s telling is that no single legitimate investor would ever sink money into someone who loses so much money on such a regular basis.
So what’s the bottom line? Yes, partly that he’s a bad business person. But more so, there is some really, really dark funding going on, and he’s at the eye of that hurricane. Most likely, Trump is at the center of a symbiotic trans-Atlantic con-game.
On this side of the Atlantic, Trump gets billions of dollars in “funding” or “investments” or “loans” - loans that probably don’t have a hard deadline. This is what keeps Trump “alive” financially. But why? What’s in it for the people who “invest” or “loan” him the money?
Well if you’re a corrupt oligarch in Russia, a former Soviet Republic, or really anywhere on the planet, and if you’re robbing your countrymen blind and looking for ways to hide money, then you can, in return, “invest” in one of Trump’s properties. The “banks” can facilitate both sides of this by being the conduit for money – for the right fees of course. I’m talking about lesser-known banks in Cyprus,
But really, we can’t say that more respectable banks are that clean, either, can we?
Oh but it probably gets better. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who undoubtedly has a hand in these relationships, now has something he couldn’t have imagined: real leverage over the United States.
Since as I recall Hillary hammered him on his business losses and the fact he hadn’t paid any taxes for years in one of their debates and on the latter point he replied with essentially “yeah, I don’t, won’t everyone if they could”. Which was one of the few hits he got on her, she unlike his Republican opponents handled the debates very well.
Hammering him on his business, ANYTHING related to his business, ANYTHING AT ALL relating to his BUSINESS, is a waste of time, waste of effort, waste of brain cells, waste of everything. His business doesn’t mean shit. He’s been PRESIDENT for four years. He’s done a shit job at being PRESIDENT.
If he lost so much money on his businesses that he didn’t owe taxes, that means he’s a lousy businessman. This is not news, since he couldn’t even make money running casinos.
He was breaking laws. The payments to Ivanka, given how they were structured, means both of them broke the law.
It’s no secret that he, and other rich people, are benefitting from the tax codes. He freely admits it. This is probably the only reasonable “gotcha” thing I’ve ever heard Trump say, from the 10/19/19 debate with Hillary Clinton.
His whole presidency has been about upholding and widening those loopholes. (And overturning everything Obama did, out of spite).
Well, there again, not everyone is going to agree that he’s done a shit job.
I don’t know…I think this story actually might have some legs with at least a small percentage of his voters. On some level, at least some people - maybe just 1-2% - have to have some second thoughts about voting for someone who is a complete and total failure.
I was raised in the heart of Trump Land, and I know how these people think. Part of the argument for Trump was that he was a ‘smart’ business guy, and that he would use his business skills to streamline things for businesses like theirs, or like the ones they worked for. Part of Trump world’s ego is fed by making themselves believe that they are masters of capitalism and that they have a unique ability to understand wealth creation in ways that dumbass libruls don’t. Libruls who can’t do, teach; libruls who can’t even teach, work as debt serfs at Starbucks, Trader Joes, or Uber, either serving them like butlers or driving them to the airport like personal chauffeurs, 'cause libbies are too stupid to understand (and don’t have the work ethic anyway) how to make money.
Maybe I’m dangerously naive, but a part of me still wants to believe that while MAGA-voters would quite likely vote for Vince McMahon or Dana White for president, they would stop just short of voting for a known con artist Bernie Madoff or Jeff Skilling. I hope that more of these documents will drive the point home that Trump isn’t a self-made asshole like Vince McMahon or Dana White, but is instead more like Bernie Madoff or Jeff Skilling: a glorified thug.
The first Trump voter I ever talked to (in 2016) was excited because Trump was “so rich, he couldn’t be corrupted by Washington. He didn’t need the money, he didn’t need to beg for campaign donations, he could be his own man.”
Now, i doubt this guy is going to turn on Trump, but some voters will hopefully be a bit disgusted by the lies and corruption.
He got out of the casino business more than a decade ago, after having six business bankruptcies. COVID had nothing to do with it.
Casino Bankruptcies:
- Trump Taj Mahal (1991)
- Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino (1992)
- Plaza Hotel (1992)
- Trump Castle Hotel and Casino (1992)
- Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (2004)
- Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009)
Acttually, even dodgy accountants have a tougher time cooking the books so it doesn’t look suspicious then you would think. Applying Benford’s law to Enron’s data makes the fraud quite detectable and I would imagine they were better at it than anyone Trump could hire.
Nigrini (2005) uses Benford’s Law to identify wide-scale earnings management in the periodaround the Enron crisis. He particularly studies the revenue numbers and earnings per share data in Enron’s reported financial statement numbers released in 2001 and 2002. His empirical results
8 reveal that the incidence of zeros in revenue numbers in the second digit position increased in 2002 as did the occurrence of zeros in the last digit position. Hence, his testable hypothesis of an increase in rounding up behaviour in 2002 is found to be valid.
I think Trump is handling this poorly and that’s going to knock a few undecideds off the fence. If his tax returns indicate how much of a smart businessman he is, he shouldn’t be calling them fake news. But of course that’s what he’s doing because he’s an idiot.