I’m not sure what that means. I admit I haven’t studied his 1995 tax return.
But is that what happened with Trump? In the casino situation you’ve described, the IRS would treat it as a $100 gain. The only way to count it as losing $999,800 would be to count it as gaining $999,900 in a different year (as far as I’m aware). If he did that, and paid taxes on the gain, then it’s OK with me if he uses the loss as offset against other income.
Again, please don’t think I’m here to defend Trump. We just have so much valid material - use that!
I don’t think many here are reporting that it was illegal or unfair, only that this is more evidence on what a huuuge liar Trump is about his worth and his monumental hypocrisy and the reprehensible way he uses the money that most likely has thanks to those legal tax maneuvers.
Read this tweet: Link.Trump was pissed off that 50% of Americans do not pay any Federal income tax despite “crippling government debt.” (They still pay payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. – but the tax laws are such that in any given year, they do not pay the Federal income tax, in the vast, vast majority of cases because they aren’t making enough money to do so or receive family tax credits that wipe out what they owe.)
It is entirely plausible – some may say likely – that at the exact time he posted the tweet, he was one of those Americans who paid no income tax.
Do you truly believe that it says “nothing” about his view on taxes that he finds poor people paying not enough in income taxes to reduce the national debt to be an annoying thing; but if he pays nothing in income taxes, he is being “smart?” I’m not asking you for the legalities of the tax code, I’m asking if his statements are not illuminating to you in the slightest on how he thinks the country should tax its people.
I read the above and other sources (who admit they are going on partial evidence but speaking from experienced viewpoints) as saying the $900M was no actual loss of Trump’s, but a paper loss created by certain interpretations of the situation.
I agree that substantial business losses, if actual, can be used to offset equivalent amounts of income. That appears not to be the case here; Trump looks to have used an essentially phantom loss like my gambling analogy to claim exemption on nearly a billion in other income.
All he has to do is release his taxes like every other candidate for decades… but he won’t. How very strange of him.
You won’t find it there. The detailed explanation for the loss was not in the return sent to the Times.
BTW, the article in the Times about this today said that if the loss was forgiven it would then count as income, and be taxable. Did that happen? We’d have to see the later returns to know for sure.
The losses in part come from special loopholes given to real estate developers. Trump claims he wants to close some loopholes - but not the ones that benefit him.
You might want to think about why Trump is so dead set about not releasing his returns if they would show him to be an upright citizen. Forgiven losses, by the way, count as income.
Not only that, Trump has deliberately not provide his tax returns, something every candidate has done for the past 30 years. So it further paints him as someone with something to hide.
That he would say “because I’m smart” during the debate further paints Trump as a narcissist who is out of touch with the common folk.
Also, I think people would give him more of a pass if he wasn’t such an arrogant asshole.
I generally have no time for arguments about hypocrisy, so I see this as a simple issue of values: its clear that Trump thinks poor people should pay more in taxes and the rich should not. (That he proposes tax policies that would benefit him in particular isn’t especially surprising to me, of course.)
For many, many years, Dems have criticized fiscal conservatives who argue for cutting taxes on the basis that these conservatives have a thinly-veiled agenda of raising taxes on the poor and cutting them for the rich. I actually think that many fiscal conservatives do not have this intention: they don’t want to see taxes raised on the poor or middle class, they just believe as a matter of dogma that cutting taxes on the rich will boost economic growth, lower the deficit, end global warming (if it is ever proven to exist), stop terrorism go back in time and kill Hitler before he does anything bad – there’s just literally nothing that lower taxes cannot accomplish!
Now we have a major party candidate who literally believes the exact thing that Dems have been accusing trickle-downers of for so many years: the poor should pay more, the rich should pay less. It should be shocking to our conscience that someone would actually think this, along with the idea that it is the poor, and not the mega-rich, who get all the breaks in life. But that’s Trump.
Here’s a better takedown of how Trump made a series of horrible “deals” that lost that billion through poor management, and managed to keep filling his pockets while others went flat broke or out of business, and then managed to convert that loss (spread among many) into a billion in gains (for himself).
Yeah, just the smart dealer we want f*cking with national policy.
No. All that I’m saying is that you don’t judge a business or a coach by the results of a few decisions taken in isolation. Is Nick Saban a bad coach because he loses a few games? Is Microsoft dumb for infusing Apple with cash and keeping a rival alive?
As to the harshness, all I said was that perhaps such a big loss during a good economic period should lead to some skepticism of his claims of business genius. I thought your dismissal of this deserved some prime snark.
Depending on where the exemption line would be drawn, advocates of a flat tax believe this. It’s not hypocritical to say that lower income folks should pay more, and higher income folks should pay less, if the goal is to peg the income tax burden at a certain percent.
I personally think that the amount of people that pay no federal income tax is too high. There is a moral hazard when a person does not need to contribute to the things they are pushing for.