The Clinton website has a Trump “Smart” Tax Calculator that you could use to see how much you’d pay in taxes if you were like Trump.
This is such a bullshit argument. Please explain to me - or anyone else making say $50-250k, what legal methods they could take advantage of to avoid paying any taxes - or even to significantly reduce their tax liability?
Having said that, I can honestly say that I have NEVER complained about the amount of taxes I have spent. Sure, I’ve complained about how they were spent, but as I sit in my comfortable home in my safe neighborhood, having gotten my children through public schools, it has never crossed my mind that I am overtaxed.
I just can’t get my mind around how people who have been vastly more successful than I, can think that they ought not contribute to the system within which they succeeded.
That part about loss carry-forward has been on the books for a long time. If you have some proof that Trump personally had to lobby to keep it on the books, that might be interesting. Otherwise, not so much.
That’s a fine argument, except for the fact that the federal income tax system doesn’t do that. The reason the tax burden falls heavily on the poor and middle class is more because of state taxes than federal taxes.
Those are two separate things. Trump should be called to task for not paying his employees and/or contractors. But for taking legit tax deductions? No.
True enough, but he should also be called to task for being such a shitty businessman that he lost the billion in the first place.
There is nothing bullshit about it. If you want to have a huge ta credit, buy a business, trash it, and sell it at loss. Or buy some really risky real estate, and sell that at a loss. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of degrees. Or, to put it differently: If you suddenly realizes you could take a write-off that would allow you to pay no taxes (and it was totally legit) would you take it or not?
Um, he’s not only lobbying to keep the taxes the same, he’s been a pretty public proponent of lowering taxes on billionaires. Not sure how his tax burden could go lower than zero, but there’s probably a way.
Trump has said just about everything on all sides of all kinds of issues. He’s also said certain rich people ('carried interest treatment) ‘get away with murder’ on taxes which sounds more like the liberal he presented himself as for most of his public adult life. But complaining about the tax system, especially that lower income people don’t pay enough, has not been central to his pitch at all. So I don’t see hypocrisy as much of an issue here.
Whatever the actual issue is supposed to be. Loss carry forwards are a pretty basic feature of the tax code, and make sense. To have $900mil in NOL’s cover $900mil gains in the future…you first have to lose $900mil. That’s not really a ‘loophole’, and definitely not a ‘special’ break. If the point is that Trump is a guy who sometimes (realizes) losses of $900+mil, that’s theoretically notable, except it’s already known he almost went under around that time.
So when Trump lamented that half of Americans pay no income tax despite “crippling” national debt, was he including himself in that criticism? Or did we just misunderstand his tweet, and these Americans are “smart” for legally not paying income taxes?
Even if I concede that this is true, and he somehow deserves to not pay income tax for 20 years, while his income was in the billions of dollars, you don’t get to say these things:
“Barack Obama who wants to raise all our taxes, only pays 20.5% on $790k salary.”
“HALF of Americans don’t pay income tax despite crippling govt debt”
And not be laughed at when it turns out that you pay 0.0% on billions of salary and are in that half of Americans who aren’t paying income tax. That’s where he’s wrong.
That’s pretty much my takeaway from this whole thing. I mean, use the tax code to your advantage, sure. But a billion dollar loss for a year where a monkey throwing darts at a list of S&P 500 stocks would have done a shit ton better does not persuade me into believing your narrative of being a talented businessman.
Or maybe he just has a really good accountant. We don’t know how much of Trump’s income is sheltered from US taxation no matter what, nor do we know how much of that loss was real vs paper.
Sure, and that looks even worse, at least to me. I’m going with best-case scenario, all-is-above-board and he just happened to have a bad year in 1995.
Again, you can find Trump saying all kinds of stuff, stuff that sounds like a liberal’s caricature of a conservative, actually like a conservative, or a like a liberal (the category most of his public statements fell into for decades). It’s probably a matter of opinion to be just left as such, but in my perception complaint about poor people not paying taxes has been very peripheral to Trump’s pitch. Taxes in general have been pretty marginal.
As to the first sentence or so ‘even if you concede’. What’s fundamentally unfair about a system with takes into account losses businesses make when taxing their owners on the gains they make? We can say I think at least that that’s less than obvious to everyone. And definitely not something special that Trump negotiated or lobbied for.
Note, I’m fine with most political spin in both directions when people don’t start treating things like some actual moral issue when they’re not. If Clinton can effectively embarrass Trump with voters via an NYT article that intimates something Trump himself basically already admitted, that’s politics. If it were to lead to ‘tax reform’ that didn’t take into account losses when calculating taxes on gains, that would be counter productive for everyone in the long run. Similarly IMO for ‘reforms’ emphasizing higher taxes on capital, just be another way to remain stuck in the productivity/growth rut we’re in. Taxes can be progressive but still be based on consumption so not discourage capital formation (eg. investment/reinvestment gets an unlimited deduction, but income that isn’t reinvested, therefore must have been directed to consumption, can be taxed at progressively higher rates if there’s more of it)
More funny ironic Trump tweets:
“Mitt Romney,who totally blew an election that should have been won and whose tax returns made him look like a fool, is now playing tough guy.” (Replace “Mitt Romney” with “Donald Trump”)
“To the geniuses at ‘Americans United for Change’: the more you tax me the less people I employ. Get it?” (his improper use of fewer vs. less is disqualifying, as far as I’m concerned. But, you didn’t pay any income tax, so why are you complaining, exactly?)
“In this time of economic turmoil where millions of Americans are unemployed, our tax dollars are paying @BillMoyers’ big @PBS salary!” (Who is “our”? You didn’t pay a dime.)
“The hedge fund guys (gals) have to pay higher taxes ASAP. They are paying practically nothing. We must reduce taxes for the middle class!” (They’re stupid for paying “practically” nothing, and I’m smart for paying “actually” nothing!)
…And any voter who believes that this statement implies in any way that Trump would actually “fix it,” will be added to mailing lists for receiving “Nigerian Prince” and “make money at home stuffing envelopes!” and “New Deposit to Your Bank Account: receipt in zip file attachment” emails.
Trump is not going to do anything to increase his own tax obligations, nor the tax obligations of his children. No loop hole will be closed; more will be created.
So, because he takes both sides of every issue, he gets a pass for whatever happens? That’s insane. His talk of freeloaders in the system is absolutely the crux of his campaign. His anti-immigration nonsense is rooted in calling them freeloaders (well, that and rapists, I guess). That he turns out to be a freeloader par excellence, is delicious.
He lost a billion dollars 20 years ago. According to him, he’s made 10 billion since then. It is fundamentally unfair that he takes the one year he lost money by being shitty at business (pretty sure you had to try to lose money in 1995) that he then can use that to somehow offset the immense gains for the next 20 years.
Now, obviously, he didn’t actually make 10 billion since 1995, but it’s delicious that he can’t actually make that argument.
Again, I doubt anything he did is illegal, and that makes it worse. He’s paying nothing in taxes and he’s actually lobbied to have the tax rate decreased. I’m hoping this becomes a bigger issue than Donald Trump, and that the GOP is likely scrambling to damage control the issue of a fundamentally unfair tax system.
Yes. And isn’t it much “worse” than this with buildings? If you buy a $100 million building, and then collect $100 million in rent profits over several years, you pay no taxes — the profit is offset by “depreciation” on the building, even though the building hasn’t actually decreased in value. When you now sell the building for $100 million do you pay capital gains tax on that? Not necessarily, especially if you swap one building for another rather than selling it outright.
I’ve no idea about the details here, but Trump’s tax lawyers do. He’s got the best tax lawyers. Huuuuge, everybody says so.
“The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
It just keeps getting better and better…
This story appears to be getting some traction. I mean, we may very well be talking about criminal tax fraud, of gargantuan proportions.
LOCK HIM UP!!! LOCK HIM UP!!!