Trump’s Tax Avoidance Was Perfectly Legal. That’s Why It’s an Issue.

[DonViejo]

By Eric Levitz

October 4, 2016
3:11 p.m.

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Morning Joe ✔
@Morning_Joe
.@morningmika to Clinton: Get off your high horse about this tax thing. Unless laws were broken, it's not an issue.

6:38 AM - 4 Oct 2016
731 Retweets 865 likes

The copious problems with this analysis all flow from three basic premises:

1. Policy and reality don’t matter.

2. Personality and perception do.

3. The political media has no responsibility to try to change these facts.

First, let’s take Scarborough’s opening salvo: To say that Hillary Clinton is more “in the pocket of Wall Street than anybody else who has run for president” is to pretend that policy agendas don’t exist. Clinton has certainly collected a tremendous amount of campaign donations from the finance industry. As the front-runner — and the one remaining candidate whose election isn’t widely considered a threat to the global economy — it makes sense that Wall Street would invest in her.

But to say that she is more “in the pocket” of Wall Street than her opponent is to suggest that she is more likely to do the finance industry’s bidding once she gains power. This is factually wrong, as my colleague Jonathan Chait recently observed:

The reality is that Clinton favors strengthening the already-tough regulations on Wall Street created by Dodd-Frank, by levying a risk fee on the largest banks and tightening the Volcker Rule. Trump, on the other hand, proposes “close to dismantling of Dodd-Frank,” which, he claims, “has made it impossible for bankers to function.”

One doesn’t need to personally trust Clinton to know she will be “tougher” on Wall Street than her opponent. For Clinton, the political price of repealing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Dodd-Frank’s other reforms is immense — she would lose the support of an enormous swath of her party’s base. This is not the case for Trump, who has lost none of his base since calling for a moratorium on financial regulations.

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/trumps-tax-avoidance-was-legal-thats-why-its-an-issue.html