Trump may not have paid income tax for 18 years

[webfact]

Trump may not have paid income tax for 18 years

 

 

WASHINGTON: -- Donald Trump’s taxes are back in the spotlight after The New York Times published the Republican nominees 1995 income tax returns.

 

The records appear to show Trump’s businesses lost $916m, (816 million euros) suggesting the loss would have been large enough to wipe out more than $50m (45 million euros) in annual federal taxes over 18 years.

 

From Washington, our correspondent Stephan Grobe said: “The revelation that Donald Trump could have avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in income taxes has become the dominant issue of the election campaign – and potentially opened a can of worms for the Republican nominee.

 

Yes, it was legal, but piling up almost a billion dollars of losses in one year cuts into Trump’s argument of being a great businessman. In addition, as the candidate’s voluminous social media record shows Trump has taken to Twitter many times over the past years to denounce tax avoiders and complain about the misuse of his own tax dollars.

 

By playing with the tax code, Trump is now feeding the anger of his own core base that believes that the system is rigged and the cards are stacked in favor of people like Trump.”

 

The Trump campaign has said the document was illegally obtained by the New York Times and has accused the newspaper of being biased in favour of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

 

 

-- © Copyright Euronews 2016-10-04

[Ulysses G.]

What a load of crap. He lost lots of money many years ago and has been living like a king ever since. That makes him a good businessman compared to most of us. He has paid the taxes that he was required to and nothing more. There is nothing here to see. 

Edited October 3, 2016 by Ulysses G.

[boomerangutang]

He has royally cheated the system and he admits it.  He doesn't deserve to drive on roads or bridges.  He's paid less for taxes than any janitor.  Everything he's achieved has been with other peoples' money and by cheating.

[Ulysses G.]

4 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:

He has royally cheated the system and he admits it.  

 

 Please provide some evidence that he said he has cheated the sytem. What he did was legal. That is not cheating.

[webfact]

Clinton tears into Trump on taxes; he says he'll save nation

By KEN THOMAS and JONATHAN LEMIRE

 

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Hillary Clinton tore into Donald Trump's tax maneuvering, business skills and trustworthiness Monday as she sought to capitalize on news that the New York real estate mogul may have paid no federal taxes for years. Unfazed, he boasted of using U.S. tax laws "brilliantly" and cast himself as a savvy business survivor poised to save a reeling nation.

 

Campaigning at a Toledo train station, Clinton castigated Trump as a cold-hearted and bungling businessman who "represents the same rigged system that he claims he's going to change." She called for a new law requiring presidential candidates from major parties to release their tax returns, as Trump has refused to do, and she accused him of shirking his responsibility as a taxpayer.

 

"He's taken corporate excess and made a business model out of it," she said. "It's Trump first and everyone else last."

 

The Democrat's broadside was her first response to a weekend New York Times report that Trump claimed a loss of nearly $916 million in a single year on his personal tax filings. The Times said the size of the loss could have allowed him to avoid federal taxes for nearly two decades, an assertion his campaign neither confirmed nor disputed.

 

Nor did Trump.

 

Instead, at a Colorado rally, he portrayed himself as a man who bounced back from financial losses, will recover from a currently difficult stretch of the campaign and propel the nation to a similar turnaround.

 

"On Nov. 8, America's comeback begins," he told cheering supporters in Pueblo.

 

As for questions about his tax history, Trump said he had "brilliantly used those laws ... legally used the tax laws to my benefit and to the benefit of my company, my investors and my employees."

 

"The unfairness of the tax laws is unbelievable. It's something I've been talking about for a long time, despite, frankly, being a big beneficiary of the laws," Trump told the crowd in Pueblo. "But I'm working for you now. I'm not working for Trump."

 

He acknowledged business failures as well as successes but declared, "I'm still here."

 

He said that "our country is in need of a major comeback," just like the one he was able to pull off after near-financial collapse in the 1990s — and the one, he implied, he would make from his recent drop in the polls after a difficult campaign week.

 

Several of Trump's surrogates also rallied to note that the Times report did not allege wrongdoing and they contended the Republican presidential candidate was a "genius" for using the tax system to rebuild his fortune.

 

At the same time, the Clinton campaign seized on the comment with a new TV ad, asking, "If not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make the rest of us?"

 

In her remarks in Ohio, Clinton mocked: "What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in a single year?"

 

Other Trump troubles mounted.

 

Former cast and crew members from the reality TV show "The Apprentice" described for the first time his treatment of women on the set. Show insiders told The Associated Press that Trump rated female contestants by the size of their breasts and talked about which ones he'd like to have sex with.

 

The campaign issued a broad denial, calling the claims "totally false."

 

Also Monday, the New York attorney general's office ordered the Trump Foundation to immediately stop fundraising in the state, saying it isn't registered to do so.

 

The back-to-back bad news piled on a week of Trump missteps and his increasingly aggressive personal attacks on Clinton. Since a rocky debate last week, Trump has engaged in a distracting feud with a former beauty queen he called "Miss Piggy" because she gained weight during her reign. He seemed to try to shift the conversation Saturday night when he suggested, without evidence, that Clinton may have cheated on her husband.

 

Trump's campaign is searching for a way to rattle Clinton — while also getting control of its own message. The new revelations only make that harder. While the incomplete tax records published by the Times show no irregularities, the size of Trump's loss cuts at a core tenet of his presidential bid — his remarkable business success. Meanwhile, his boorish comments are threatening to turn away female voters.

 

Trump was more disciplined Monday both in Pueblo and at a forum in Virginia hosted by the Retired American Warriors PAC.

 

Seizing an opportunity he missed on the debate stage last week, Trump went after Clinton's commitment to fighting cybersecurity threats and pointed to her use of a private, email server when she served as secretary of state.

 

He said Clinton's handling of classified emails on the server makes her "totally unfit" for the Oval Office.

 

But Trump's taxes dominated the conversation.

 

In a story published over the weekend, the Times said it received the first pages of Trump's 1995 state income tax filings in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from an anonymous person. The filings showed a net loss of $915,729,293 in federal taxable income for the year — losses of a magnitude that they might have allowed Trump to avoid paying taxes for years.

 

His campaign said that he had paid "hundreds of millions" of dollars in other kinds of taxes over the years.

___

Lemire reported from Pueblo, Colorado. AP writers Kathleen Hennessey, Laurie Kellman and Jeff Horwitz in Washington and Ken Thomas in Charlotte, North Carolina, contributed.

 

-- © Associated Press 2016-10-04

[tonray]

Personally there is nothing wrong with what he did as long as it was legal. 

 

The problems lie in two areas:

 

1) He claims to be a consummate businessman when in reality he is a risk taker with other people's money. Your tax dollars become the other people's money after he wins. Shutting down trade agreements and saying screw the rest of the world...your money at risk, not his.

 

2) The spectre of losing a boatload of other people's money AND getting a personal tax benefit from doing so is likely what has kept him from releasing his returns. 

 

He is a carnival barker and nothing more.

Edited October 3, 2016 by tonray

[Ulysses G.]

4 minutes ago, webfact said:

 

He said Clinton's handling of classified emails on the server makes her "totally unfit" for the Oval Office.

 

 

He is absolutely correct. He paid the taxes he was required to legally. She violated national security and lied to Congress under oath. Too bad that the fix was in. 

[boomerangutang]

26 minutes ago, Ulysses G. said:

 

 Please provide some evidence that he said he has cheated the sytem. What he did was legal. That is not cheating.

 

Several times, including during the Rep debates, he's admitted gaming the system.  You can research it.

[Ulysses G.]

Already did.  Can find no admission of cheating the system - probably because he never said it. Didn't you ask me to point out some lies about Trump on another thread? 

[boomerangutang]

Trump fans are stretching things very thin in their attempts to justify the plethora of things Trump has done wrong.   When that doesn't work, they do the following Trumpisms. . . . . . .

 

"well what about Hillary ?!  She's done bad things too!"    That's the argument of a bratty 6 yr old kid.  

 

Or

 

They literally shout down any voices of reason.  I saw it again for the umpteenth time in a youtube 'discussion' yesterday.   The reporter from ABC News was trying to ask questions of Trump's former campaign manager. the reporter couldn't even finish a sentence before the Trump fan shouted her down - because he didn't want her to finish any of her questions.   He knew he couldn't answer them, so he just kept shouting.   That's one of his guru's (Trump's) tactics for deflecting tough questions.

 

I'm concerned about America's youth.  they're learning many bad traits from the trumpster fire.  He's an abysmal influence on the youth of America.  

[boomerangutang]

type in "trump cheat' at Google and you'll see millions of references.  You will probably find the excerpts of Trump admitting he cheated the system in there also, though of course, you don't want to see/hear that sort of thing.  I don't want to do research for you, but here's an article from the Atlantic magazine.    . .  . . . 

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/donald-trump-scandals/474726/

Edited October 4, 2016 by boomerangutang

[Ulysses G.]

5 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:

type in "trump cheat' at Google and you'll see millions of references.  You will probably find the excerpts of Trump admitting he cheated the system in there also, though of course, you don't want to see/hear that sort of thing.  I don't want to do research for you, but here's an article from the Atlantic magazine.    . .  . . . 

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/donald-trump-scandals/474726/

 

Nope. I do not see any. You claimed that Trump admitted cheating the system and that does not seem to be true. Your link is a liberal hit piece, but no "admissions" of cheating the system there either.

[OMGImInPattaya]

26 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:

 

Several times, including during the Rep debates, he's admitted gaming the system.  You can research it.

It's not "gaming" anything when it's legal. The provision in the tax code, "loss carry fowards," is a well know provision in the law and is used by millions of people who have lost money in business ventures and the stock market. The only thing different here is the scale of the loss, because of the size of Trump's businesses. If people or Congress have an issue with this tax provision, they're free to change or repeal it at any time.

[keemapoot]

13 minutes ago, Ulysses G. said:

 

Nope. I do not see any. You claimed that Trump admitted cheating the system and that does not seem to be true. Your link is a liberal hit piece, but no "admissions" of cheating the system there either.

 

In that analysis I posted in another thread by the Tax expert, possibly all or most of the nearly billion dollars Trump lost may have been other people's money. He was then able to take the tax loss on losing other people's money and build it into a fortune for himself by offsetting his income tax for maybe 18 years.

 

I think many people would consider that cheating, even if not illegal. Yes, tax code, but Trump is a sleaze who prides himself on shafting other people.

Edited October 4, 2016 by keemapoot
typing over the speed limit

[OMGImInPattaya]

11 minutes ago, boomerangutang said:

 

Well, we don't agree.   I see Trump's long list of bad things, lies, cheating, .....as much worse than what HRC has been accused of by right wingers.

So, accepting your premise, arguendo, it's bad when private citizens, who aren't under oath, fib and tell whoppers about themselves and their businesses, but it's okay when high officials in government who are entrusted with running the country, lie to the people and Congress about their actions. I see where you're coming from now.

[Ulysses G.]

4 minutes ago, keemapoot said:

 

I think many people would consider that cheating, even if not illegal.

 

Still no evidence that he "admitted" cheating the system. 

[keemapoot]

1 minute ago, Ulysses G. said:

 

Still no evidence that he "admitted" cheating the system. 

 

No, he phrases all his brilliance in terms of being so smart that he takes advantage of every loophole, wins every negotiation, and has the best words, etc...  So, he admits to doing things that may not be illegal, but which are deplorable by most folks and considered cheating by many people.

[Ulysses G.]

1 minute ago, keemapoot said:

 

No, he phrases all his brilliance in terms of being so smart that he takes advantage of every loophole, wins every negotiation, and has the best words, etc...  So, he admits to doing things that may not be illegal, but which are deplorable by most folks and considered cheating by many people.

 

How many of them would pay taxes that they did not have to pay?

 

Anyway, the (FALSE?) claim was that he admitted to cheating the system, but no evidence that it ever happened has been presented. 

Edited October 4, 2016 by Ulysses G.

[keemapoot]

Just now, Ulysses G. said:

 

How many of them would pay taxes that they did not have to pay?

 

Anybody who thought he might run for President some day. You have to appear somewhat reasonable to the electorate. 

[CaptHaddock]

1 hour ago, Ulysses G. said:

What a load of crap. He lost lots of money many years ago and has been living like a king ever since. That makes him a good businessman compared to most of us. He has paid the taxes that he was required to and nothing more. There is nothing here to see. 

 

The "good business" was fobbing a portion of his losses onto us, the taxpayers, with his enormous loss carryover.  And this is in addition to the $885 million in tax breaks he collected over the years according to the Times.  As it happens I was a taxpayer victim to one of those tax breaks which I recall vividly.  New York City already had its own income tax then which was about 4% on top of federal and state.  The Koch administration announced a 10% surtax on the income tax for a few years.  So, if you owed $1000 in NYC income tax, you suddenly owed $1100.  The stated purpose of the tax surcharge was to raise $100 million for the city.  At the same time the city gave a tax abatement to Trump to renovate the old Commodore Hotel of $100 million over five years.   So, they took the money from my pocket and put it into Trump's pocket.  But that was only one chunk of the $885 million in tax breaks that Trump finagled over the years.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/nyregion/donald-trump-tax-breaks-real-estate.html?_r=0

 

Trump failed as a real estate developer after 4 commercial bankrupcies in the early 90's.  Since then he has just been selling his "brand."  He was then and is now just a con man.  The idea that he is going to champion the lot of the blue collars in America beggars belief.  Trump "University" and the Trump Foundation are just scams for which he ought to be imprisoned. 

[Ulysses G.]

4 minutes ago, keemapoot said:

 

Anybody who thought he might run for President some day.

 

No wonder he did not worry about it. No one - including him - ever took that seriously. I still do not think he got serious about it until he started winning the Republican nomination.

Edited October 4, 2016 by Ulysses G.

[Ulysses G.]

3 minutes ago, CaptHaddock said:

 

He was then and is now just a con man. 

 

Let's say you are right. It still makes him an incredibly SUCCESSFULLY con man. Not paying any taxes legally sounds pretty smart to me

[keemapoot]

1 minute ago, lannarebirth said:

 

I remember the Clinton's had to amend their tax returns when it was discovered they'd made fraudulently excessive deductions related to their Whitewater scam and of course they deducted his donated used underwear you may recall. What is "reasonable" would appear to be in the eye of the beholder.

 

Yeah, sure, I've been noting with interest for years how all these guys, George W., etc., GOP and Dems alike have always done that blind trust dance to pretend they are without bias in awarding pork barrels, etc., but I think we all knew it was just a game. The point is they made a effort to play that game, and didn't flaunt abuse of an errant tax system in our faces.

[CaptHaddock]

4 minutes ago, Ulysses G. said:

 

Let's say you are right. It still makes him an incredibly SUCCESSFULLY con man. Not paying any taxes legally sounds pretty smart to me

 

Too bad you can't vote for Al Capone.

[Ulysses G.]

1 minute ago, CaptHaddock said:

 

Too bad you can't vote for Al Capone.

 

No way. He did not pay any taxes ILLEGALY.

[lannarebirth]

Just now, CaptHaddock said:

 

Too bad you can't vote for Al Capone.

 

I wouldn't vote for Al Capone but these two candidates have got me feeling nostalgic for Nixon. He was a choir boy by comparison.

[keemapoot]

Just now, lannarebirth said:

 

I wouldn't vote for Al Capone but these two candidates have got me feeling nostalgic for Nixon. He was a choir boy by comparison.

 

Hehe.  Not only that, he was actually a very effective President. Just a little loose with the core moral values.

[lannarebirth]

2 minutes ago, keemapoot said:

 

Hehe.  Not only that, he was actually a very effective President. Just a little loose with the core moral values.

 

Nixon was much more of a moderate and progressive than Clinton is. Who knows what Trump is?

[OMGImInPattaya]

1 hour ago, boomerangutang said:

He has royally cheated the system and he admits it.  He doesn't deserve to drive on roads or bridges.  He's paid less for taxes than any janitor.  Everything he's achieved has been with other peoples' money and by cheating.

Donald Trump has paid more money in taxes in one lifetime than you would in a hundred, including property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, and Social Security taxes; not to mention the countless city, county, and state development fees and licenses paid for his many business enterprises. It seems to me that you're the one who needs to get off the road when his limousine passes you by.

[MikeyIdea]

Unfortunately, the only thing Trump has done this time is to legally not pay tax. It's not even immoral and it doesn't even make him less trustworthy...

 

He is IMO, apart from that, the most self-centered and least trustworthy person ever to run for president

 

Others, please have different opinions