Donald Trump's tax returns: What do we now know, and what do we not know?

[DonViejo]

WEDNESDAY, MAR 15, 2017 07:30 AM EDT

Donald Trump’s tax returns: What do we now know, and what do we not know?

Though Maddow's scoop was downplayed, her reporting opened up a few questions

MATTHEW ROZSA

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow released President Donald Trump’s tax returns Tuesday night, delivering something — although not the political bombshell spectators were expecting.

-snip- (copies of Maddow's tweets announcing she had the tax returns)

“The two pages show tax information one would expect for someone with Trump’s wealth and businesses,” writes Matt Ford of The Atlantic. “He paid roughly $5.3 million under regular federal income tax guidelines — a pittance for someone with his reported fortune — but also paid $31 million in what’s known as the “alternative minimum tax,” bringing his federal payment that year to about 25 percent of his income.”

After observing that an elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which Trump proposed during his campaign, would have lowered his effective tax rate in 2005 from 25 percent to 4 percent, Ford adds that “the form released on Tuesday shows more than $103 million in deductible losses, perhaps including the $14.6 million portion of that easement that could have been deducted that year, or losses reported on his 1995 forms and carried forward. It also shows that Trump checked the box for $3 of his taxes to be funneled into the presidential election campaign fund — in a year when fewer than one in 10 filers did the same.”

While these observations certainly provide insights into how the super-rich like Trump avoid paying their fair share in taxes, they were hardly original insights and did not shed any light on the potential conflicts of interest that observers (Maddow included) have speculated could explain why the president refuses to disclose them. This has caused many to criticize Maddow’s scoop as much ado about nothing, from Willa Paskin of Slate describing it as “a cautionary tale about over-hype” and Derek Hawkins of The Washington Post speculating that “Trump seemed to make it through the segment in pretty good shape — so good that a cyberspace chorus wondered for hours after the fact: Did Trump leak his own tax return?”

That latter theory was shared by David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who provided Maddow with the documents. “It’s entirely possible that Donald sent this to me. It’s a possibility, and it could have been leaked by someone in his direction,” Johnston stated. The fact that the 1040 was labeled “Client Copy” has been cited as lending credence to this hypothesis.

more
http://www.salon.com/2017/03/15/donald-trumps-tax-returns-what-do-we-now-know-and-what-dont-we-know/

[FakeNoose]

1. Alternative Minimum Tax - is not a tax it's a write-off

On Trump's 2005 tax form, we can see that he paid $5 million in taxes out of his pocket.
He didn't pay $31 million Alternative Minimum Tax - he was allowed to write it off his tax bill.
He lost money on his casinos in a previous year, I think it was 1998. (?)

So the $5 million was the only tax he paid in 2005.

He had the same AMT write-off in other years until it was used up.
I heard he used it for 20 years, but that may have been an exaggeration.

Let's hear from some tax accountants, I know you're out there.

[Igel]

3. It's a positive number under "taxes", and it carries down to the line that says,

"This is your total tax."

It's a tax. It's paid by people with a gross income over a certain level with a lot of deductions. I nearly paid it one year, missed it by $50 or so. (It kicked in at around $108k/year for the household.) It would have goosed our tax owed by a hefty amount.

The idea is that you can have a lot of deductions that make your net taxable income really small. This says you calculate your tax a second time, excluding certain deductions, and you pay basically a surcharge. It was put into the tax code in, I think, the late '60s or early '70s.

It's a real tax. It creates quite a discontinuity in the amount paid. As I mentioned, a small amount of additional income would have caused us to pay thousands of dollars more. Hadn't ever come close to the AMT cut-off before, but paid attention to it after that. (Now I'm mostly salaried with thousands of dollars between our household income and the AMT tipping point. But it means I keep my free-lancing to a minimum, and during the summer I don't try to get a temp job. That would still, probably, put us over the limit, and the summer paychecks would pretty much go entirely to the IRS. Yes, I'm disincentivized to bring in substantial income during my 2 1/2 month summer break.)

Now, he didn't fork over all that money as part of his tax filing because, like most other people, he had tax credits from payments made during the year.

[rtracey]

2. hahahha

Fuckump has you by the nuts..... 2005 tax return....12 year old tax return, and everyone is salivating over it. Its a junk dump, to get minds off of fuckump care and Russia.....dont fall for it, or if you want too...go for it.