What Trump’s tax returns tell us about him
“As far as my tax returns, you do not learn that much from tax returns,” Donald Trump assured us in last week’s presidential debate.
Another Trump statement debunked.
We learned, or were reminded of, plenty from a tiny excerpt of Trump’s tax returns that the New York Times published this weekend. From that sliver, we know beyond any doubt Trump was an incompetent businessman, at least for many years. We know he was given enormous tax benefits while risking very little of his own money. We were shown the chasm between his life-long practices and his populist message.
We got a hint of a federal tax code concocted to benefit the wealthy and particularly wealthy real estate developers. And we were reminded of how Trump wants to change that tax code to make it even friendlier to the uber-rich while proposing nothing that would take a dime from him, his family or his business interests.
If one glimpse of one state tax return 21 years ago reveals that much, imagine what a full release of Trump’s tax returns would show. It is not surprising that he has refused to follow the 40-year-old tradition of presidential candidates releasing their returns.
An anonymous source sent three pages of Trump’s 1995 state tax returns – from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut – to the Times. The returns show that Trump took a $916 million deduction that year, an amount that may have let the self-proclaimed billionaire avoid paying any federal income taxes for 18 years.
That’s almost certainly not cash out-of-pocket that Trump actually lost. Those are paper losses related to his and the economy’s cratering of his casinos, hotels and airline. The so-called net operating loss provision lets wealthy taxpayers deduct certain business losses, depreciation and other costs and use it to offset taxes on other income.
Trump also took advantage of special loopholes for commercial real estate developers to declare a $15.8 million loss on his real estate investments on his personal return. You, Mr. or Ms. Homeowner, can’t do that if the value of your home sinks.
Trump makes his case for the presidency largely on two key premises: That he has the business sense the country needs in the White House, and that he is an outsider who relates to the blue-collar Joe Lunchbucket.
The revelations from the 1995 returns undercut both of those arguments. Trump was a colossal business failure throughout the 1990s, racking up billions in debt and declaring bankruptcy four times. And he’s anything but a populist, given his aggressive use of loopholes for the rich, his failure to pay his debts to contractors and his preying on the lower and middle class with his so-called university.
All of us want to legally minimize the taxes we pay. Trump, though, wants to change the tax code to give even bigger breaks to the commercial real estate industry while doing little for the middle class. It doesn’t take a high-priced tax lawyer to know that’s a bad deal for America.
This story was originally published October 3, 2016 at 5:55 PM with the headline "What Trump’s tax returns tell us about him."