Trump’s leaked returns show his tax fixes would most help — guess who
By Ruth Marcus Columnist October 2 at 2:14 PM
“The only news here,” Donald Trump’s campaign declared in an unsigned statement emailed late Saturday night, “is that the more than 20-year-old alleged tax document was illegally obtained, a further demonstration that The New York Times, like establishment media in general, is an extension of the Clinton Campaign, the Democratic Party and their global special interests.”
No. The news — unrebutted by the Trump campaign as of this writing — is that Trump could have avoided paying federal income taxes for 18 years. Assuming that the claimed losses were legit, this would have been legal. The opportunity for tax avoidance, which could have shielded as much as $50 million a year in Trump income from any federal income tax liability whatsoever, is the result of rules that permitted him to carry forward net operating losses from his businesses 15 years into the future, and to use those losses to wipe out taxable income for three previous years as well.
It is one thing for us — that is, the rest of us tax-paying chumps — to know, thanks to disclosures required by casino regulators, that there were a few years in which Trump paid no taxes. It is one thing to suspect that there may have been additional no-tax years.
It is quite another to have documentation that strongly suggests Trump’s tax holiday could have gone on for so long. Perhaps Trump had so much income that he used up his operating loss deductions in less than the allotted time. Or perhaps his businesses generated additional losses that permitted him to pay no federal income taxes for even longer.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whom-would-donald-trumps-tax-fixes-help-the-most-donald-trump/2016/10/02/65684424-88b8-11e6-875e-2c1bfe943b66_story.html?utm_term=.eb21506942e6&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1