Friday, November 4, 2016

Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes


Donald J. Trump proudly acknowledges he did not pay a dime in federal income taxes for years on end. He insists he merely exploited tax loopholes legally available to any billionaire — loopholes he says Hillary Clinton failed to close during her years in the United States Senate. “Why didn’t she ever try to change those laws so I couldn’t use them?” Mr. Trump asked during a campaign rally last month.

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.  (more...)


H/T to TaxProf Blog. Their post:

5 comments:

  1. So that makes it okay to vote for Clinton, who is funded by the people who fund ISIS, who is an abortion advocate up until birth, who channeled Eleanor Roosevelt while FLOTUS, who has made millions of dollars by selling out the USA while Secretary of State, and whose husband is a rapist? Got it. Smh.

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  2. When the criminal class hijacked the American political system, it stopped being a democracy. Becoming Nazis to fight the Communists just drove us into the arms of another flavor of Bolshevik. If you know the political elites at all, you know they're in bed with each other. Gotta set fire to that bed.

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  3. Regardless, one is into satanic evil on a level not known in this country. She must be opposed by voters. It is the only decent thing to do in the circumstances.

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    1. Trump's a boy scout? He's just as beholden to the criminal elite as the Clintons. Under these circumstances, there are no decent options. The Nazis played the public outrage over Weimar corruption and wrapped themselves in the flag of Christian decency. Fool me once, shame on them. Fool me twice... You have to do more than just read the labels. Use your nose.

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  4. To support satanic activities such as Spirit Cooking (Podesta and company) as you are doing by condemning the sinner Trump and giving Clinton and her minions a pass (I notice you seem to condemn Trump in specifics and not Clinton) you equate sins that have no equation. Are the elites corrupt? Of course, but I refuse to despair, and therefore sin. I will take a pagan/Protestant adulterer any day over someone who sends Americans to their death, supports late term Abortion, and has satanists as intimate aides. Are we being played? Perhaps. But I cannot know that for sure, and will do what I can to lessen the evil in this world.

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