Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › NYT bombshell: Trump may have paid no income tax on a billion dollars or more.
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Billy_T.
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October 2, 2016 at 11:33 am #54269Billy_TParticipant
Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.
The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
The spin so far on the Sunday Talk shows — Giuliani has been everywhere, it seems, making wild excuses for him, creating seriously stupid strawmen — is that Trump is a genius for not paying taxes, and that he could be sued if he didn’t take advantage of this. I wish the moderators had pushed back on that. First off, how would anyone know at that time if he hadn’t taken advantage of bankruptcy laws? Giuliani insists that his investors could sue him. Again, how would they know? Second, what court in America would judge in their favor for such a lawsuit — ruling against him for paying taxes? Nonsense.
Pure desperation.
It’s also important to keep in mind this is just one of his major losses, for just one year. Trump, the supposed genius of a businessman, went bankrupt six times.
No wonder he’s hiding his tax records from the public. They’d reveal how he’s duped his supporters, screwed over workers, contractors, charities and America as a whole.
Trump is very lucky the Dems put up a relatively weak candidate. This race would have been over months ago if they had put forth a stronger one, and HRC will very likely win anyway. Dissatisfaction with Clinton just won’t be enough to offset Trump’s truly abhorrent personality, or his despicable vision for America.
October 2, 2016 at 1:33 pm #54279
bnwBlockedTypical NY Times BS. “may have” doesn’t cut it. Terrible reporting. Much like their lies about Trump and the women he dated. If he’s following the law then don’t blame him, change the law. This story boils down to he followed the law. Let me know when he deducts his used undies on his taxes or when in office he rents out the Lincoln Bedroom or steals the White House china like the Clinton Crime Syndicate.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
October 2, 2016 at 5:10 pm #54293bnwBlockedNow it’s reported that the NY Times didn’t pay the tax either. Hypocrites.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
October 3, 2016 at 1:13 pm #54387Billy_TParticipantDonald Trump’s leaked tax returns help explain why he wants to end the estate tax — Josh Barro
Excerpts:
The $916 million loss that Donald Trump reported on his 1995 income taxes was extraordinary. As Alan Cole from the conservative Tax Foundation notes, total net operating losses claimed on all individual income tax returns in 1995 amounted to $49.3 billion.*
That is, in that year, Trump claimed nearly 2% of all the net negative business income on individual tax returns in the entire country.
and
But there is one important upshot from the “he’s a genius” explanation that hasn’t been remarked on much. That Trump has accrued so many reported losses on his taxes helps explain why he’s so eager to repeal the estate tax.
As I noted above, the “genius” of using strategies like depreciation expenses on real estate isn’t that they avoid tax forever. It’s that they allow a long delay in taxes on income related to real estate. Under current law, those taxes end up getting delayed until a real-estate asset is sold (and sometimes longer; a strategy called a 1031 exchange allows you to continue the delay so long as you buy a similar asset with the proceeds of the sale) or until you die.
At your death, the appreciation on real-estate assets doesn’t get taxed. But if you’re worth more than $10 million, like Trump presumably is, most of the value of your bequeathed assets can be subjected to estate tax at rates up to 40%. That can be a bigger bite than the income tax that got avoided all along.
But if Trump gets elected and gets his way on estate-tax repeal, he’ll be able to pass his assets to his children tax-free when he dies — and his children (and their children and their children) will be able to avoid tax on accrued gains in the value of their real-estate portfolio as long as they don’t ever sell it.
That is, Trump seems to have cleverly used the tax code to delay a lot of taxes. But if he becomes president, he can find a way for him and his family to avoid ever having to pay tax on a bunch of the income he’s earned over the decades.
In a way, that would be pretty smart. It’s a lot smarter than the way he managed his casinos.
October 3, 2016 at 5:07 pm #54421Billy_TParticipantA follow-up article on the Trump tax return:
Excerpt:
Sure, the $900 million-plus of losses reported by the New York Times — losses that could be used to offset income for a total of 18 years — are totally shocking. Legal, yes. But shocking.
But there’s something I consider even more shocking — although it involves a much smaller number.
By my read of the Trump tax return published by the New York Times, he would have been tax-free because of a $15,818,562 loss reported on Line 11 of the return under “Rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” It looks to me that this loss reflects the outrageous, special tax break that real estate developers that people like Trump can get, but that the rest of us can’t.
To give you the brief version, people who qualify as real estate developers or managers can use depreciation deductions to offset non-real-estate income. But people who don’t qualify for this special treatment can’t do that. (For full details, ask a tax expert about Section 469 of the tax code.)
Now, to the $900-plus million loss reported by the New York Times — which vastly exceeds any cash losses that Trump would have suffered in the collapse of his casino-hotel-airline empire, which fell apart in the early 1990s and resulted in four bankruptcies. (He had two more bankruptcies, in 2004 and 2009, from a publicly traded company in which he was the primary shareholder.)
I’m guessing, but I can’t tell for sure — there’s not enough information — that the loss has to do with the collapse of his empire. I don’t understand how Trump, who had very little of his own cash invested in his projects in the 1990s but did personally guarantee part of their debt, could end up with tax losses of that magnitude. They’re almost certainly paper losses rather than out-of-pocket losses.
It’s possible that those losses somehow vanished into the ether from which they came — we have no way to tell.
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