It’s his personal federal income taxes*. The key concept here is a “net operating loss,” which the NYT article can explain better than I can.
But the most important revelation from the 1995 tax documents is just how much Mr. Trump may have benefited from a tax provision that is particularly prized by America’s dynastic families, which, like the Trumps, hold their wealth inside byzantine networks of partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations.
The provision, known as net operating loss, or N.O.L., allows a dizzying array of deductions, business expenses, real estate depreciation, losses from the sale of business assets and even operating losses to flow from the balance sheets of those partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations onto the personal tax returns of men like Mr. Trump. In turn, those losses can be used to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income from, say, book royalties or branding deals.
The underlying principle here is defensible, because in practice there are millions of small businesses where the owner’s financial fortunes are totally tied up with the business’s, and it’d be shitty to pretend that a losing year for the business wasn’t also a losing year for the owner, even though the owner paid herself a salary. Obviously, by the time we get to $916,000,000 “losses” that never once affected Trump’s personal wealth, it’s a different story, but the one thing I guarantee we won’t find out is that Trump broke these tax laws. The whole point of them is that it’s safer and more legal and more profitable to follow them.
* or rather, what he told NJ and CT on their tax forms that he’d reported to the IRS, which is either the same thing or the dumbest, largest tax fraud in the history of the world.
Of course he was the first condemn the leaked documents from the DNC and the fact that Hillary is criticized for a lot of technically legal activities. I remember it distinctly.
You’re right. I guess it was inevitable that at some time something would come out showing he’d done something legal. We shouldn’t judge him too harshly for that.
Simply put; If you find them equally bad then you’re clearly not judging them by the same standards. Trump has all of Hillary’s weaknesses and none of her strengths.
Also, as @ActionAbe alluded above you only seem to turn out to attack one side.
Even that is a statement that is soft on Trump. Trump has all the weaknesses Hillary Clinton has, but in every single case he is both weaker and there is more proof to how weak he is behind it.
I know very little about her, but - Is she a racist bully with a personality disorder? No. Can she learn, can she listen to the advice of others? I suspect yes. Is she smart and even-tempered? Compared to Trump, again I suspect yes. Even this isn’t a remotely fair comparison.
I can’t even conceive of the Democrats nominating anyone half as awful as Trump without the party changing completely. Some of the people supporting Trump voted for Obama, but this election alone has revealed something - the majority of Democratic voters are not equivalent to the majority of Republican voters. Previous to this election, I would have said that although the Republican politicians on the whole were awful - irrational and hateful - compared to their Democratic equivalents, the voters themselves were fairly equivalent. I realize now that this just isn’t the case. The Republicans have been building up to this for a while - they’ve made hate a central party value for decades, they’ve derided knowledge and facts, they’ve cultivated a know-nothing electorate. Trump may not be ideologically “conservative” enough in the eyes of the Republican party establishment, but very few voters care or understand that, and he’s exactly the sort of candidate they’ve been selecting for in every other respect. The Republican and Democratic party just are not equivalent, either in their politicians or voters, at this point.
I would say that’s more straightforwardly an argument that he’s a hypocrite.
If I don’t believe that America needs more military, then his not paying taxes for those things wouldn’t make him unpatriotic. I think you’re implying that “patriotic” means “against what America needs”, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but “what America needs” can vary wildly from person to person, even among friends, family, and people in the same party.
“Patriotism” is therefor a sloppy term. Let’s keep the derision of Drumpf more actual than that. There’s no shortage of fodder to use.
Trump’s extremist supporters generally believe the IRS is a corrupt institution that should be abolished, so they will salute him for this. As for the rest of the people who can stomach voting for him, they aren’t voting “for” him. They are voting against Clinton, I have heard people with my own ears say they would vote for anyone if she is the only other option.
Add that to the fact she loses a lot of the far left with her fiscal polices and hawkishness, people who are also often apt to bow out completely because of their mistrust and feelings of disenfranchisement, she’s gonna need a way bigger October surprise to spring on Trump than this.
I would not be surprised at all if Trump paid no taxes. He’s not the only one. And they do it legally. Ariana Huffington for instance, paid a total of 700 dollars over the 2 years she showed to the press when she was running for governor of Ca on an income of about 400K. And she was living in a 7 million dollar house.
The problem is a tax code that is tens of thousands of pages long. It’s written and designed for this. Our politicians get lobbied to create these carve-outs. The whole tax code needs to be put in the dumpster.
I’m curious did you actually listen to that recording or read a transcript? Cause her comments were actually pretty understanding of where those people were coming from. And the hardcore Bernie or busters I know in the real life have actually been lamenting that there wasn’t anything nasty there as the headlines had lead them to believe.
@semiotix gets the gist of it. Basically depending on how your business is structured the returns for a business you own are tied to your own personally taxes directly. And apart from any compensation that business pays you as part of its operation. Profit or loss from a business gets reported as part of your personal return. Loss becomes a deduction in offset to your total income. Profits may be taxed as part of your personal income as well. Usually in lieu of the business itself paying its own taxes (to avoid that income being taxed twice). Though that depends on which sort of business (llc, partnership, S-corp etc). Trump has been called out in the past for only using business structures that allow him to do this, and though these things are often meant for small businesses to simplify their tax implications they’re also commonly used by the wealthy for tax avoidance and to hide money in tax shelters.
At it simplest you can do things like take a business with a slight profit, pay yourself a a salary large enough to put that business in the red. Then you’re personally on the hook for the income tax, but can use the loss from the business as a deduction to reduce your personally tax liability. Reducing the overall tax rate. Which is not in itself bad. Its a common approach used by freelancers/the self employed to reduce their tax liability. Which is a good thing because freelancers often pay a much, much, higher tax rate than employees for the same level of income. The base idea being to allow people in those sorts of situations to bring their tax rate down to levels enjoyed by the general population. But it can be taken advantage of in ways both legal and illegal to dodge taxes legitimately owed. And the more money, more businesses, and higher level these things operate the more complicated they get and the less sensible.
Obviously Trump is doing this on a more complicated, massive level. But that billion dollar loss apparently would allow him $50 million dollar write offs, every year, for 18 years. Regardless of how much money he was actually making. For his personal returns. And that’s just one slice of one years returns. And just one business loss write off from a guy who has hundreds or more actual business entities to do this with.
Ok, so I can see the intention behind that section of tax code to help protect small business owners (and their entrepreneurship). But why aren’t there caps on those deductions?
That’s semi-rhetorical. Clearly the rich people taking especial advantage of such deductions want it to stay that way. But how widely known to the public is this sort of financial legerdemain?
