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Trump for the working class..
#11
The BBC has a list of the tweets in which Trump shames others for not paying their fair share of tax..

Quote:Donald Trump's past tweets about taxes are drawing fresh scrutiny after the New York Times reported he paid no taxes for nearly two decades having declared losses approaching $1bn. The Republican presidential candidate has used his Twitter megaphone in recent years to wag a finger at everyone from Barack Obama to Amazon boss Jeff Bezos on paying their fair share.
Ten times Trump shamed others on tax - BBC News
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#12
Indeed!

Quote:All the Times has is three pages of Trump’s records from 1995. Everything else is informed speculation, extrapolation, and the word “could,” which appears again and again through the article. Think about how dangerous that was for the paper. Trump could have released his tax returns and proven them wrong. Trump could have shown their speculation to be mere speculation, and used it as a cudgel to discredit their reporting on his campaign.

The Times was far, far out on a limb. But the Times bet correctly. Trump still isn’t releasing his returns. And here’s what that means: Whatever is in his returns is worse than what the New York Times is telling the world is in his returns. The Trump campaign has decided it prefers the picture the Times is painting — a picture where Trump didn’t pay taxes for 18 years — to the picture Trump’s real records would paint.
Whatever is actually in Trump’s tax returns is worse than what the New York Times says - Vox
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#13
Does Trump actually belief what he (and Giuliani and Christie and others) say?

Quote:Trump continued this approach in responding to the New York Times story. He did not deny that Trump’s 1995 return enabled him to avoid paying taxes for many years. Rather, a statement from the Trump campaign described Trump as “a highly skilled businessman” with a duty to “pay no more tax than legally required.” “Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President,” the statement concluded.

Of course, if he really believed not paying taxes made him look good, he could have released these returns himself. He hid them instead.

Trump appears to be taking the opposite approach. His lawyer threatened to sue the New York Times if they printed the story.
One year of Trump’s tax returns were just revealed. Now we know why he won’t release the rest.
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#14
Wait, there is more..

Quote:The executive of any company, public, or private, who has a wide variety of constituents, from shareholders to bondholders to employees, suppliers and, to a lesser extent customers, has a duty to serve those constituents ahead of the interests of the CEO. That is the definition of "fiduciary responsibility."

Donald Trump, and his surrogates, has said that by lowering his personal tax bill, maybe as low as zero dollars paid in federal and state income taxes, that he was serving his constituents. That's hogwash! Horse hockey! Bull----! Mr. Trump does have a constituency … but it is a constituency of one … himself.

Reducing his personal tax bill does absolutely nothing for any business he may be running, public or private, and more than likely the losses he generated to reduce his personal tax liability very likely came at THE EXPENSE of shareholders, bondholders, employees and vendors.

Judging from the trajectory of the Plaza Hotel, his casino and hotel businesses, his steak, vodka and University enterprises, neither his investors, vendors, nor customers shared in his "good fortune." Indeed, they almost all lost money, even as he was finding ways to make money by losing money. That, dear readers, is the exact opposite of fiduciary responsibility. We can re-name it, pecuniary responsibility, putting one's individual financial needs ahead of the constituents served.

There is no genius involved in using business losses to reduce one's personal tax bill. However, it does take a special kind of genius to LOSE a billion dollars and claim one is a business success.

Multiple bankruptcies, billion dollar losses, alleged misdirection of income to charitable foundations and, published reports suggesting potential further abuses of the tax code, are not the characteristics normally ascribed to a great business builder.
I'm calling BS on the whole 'genius' spin on Trump's taxes—commentary
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#15
Oh dear..

Quote:Trump is also not getting much of an assist from his top surrogates. In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani called Trump a "genius" for the giant tax loss and said the GOP nominee's wizardry would be better for the nation than "a woman." For good measure, Giuliani threw in that "everybody" engages in extramarital affairs.
Donald Trump's campaign appears to be slipping into death spiral
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#16
We had to read this twice. Postcards from Trumpland..

Quote:The Republican nominee labeled the US tax laws he took advantage of as unfair, despite that fact that he was, self-admittedly, a "big beneficiary" of them. "But I'm working for you now, I'm not working for Trump," Trump said, to raucous cheers. "Believe me." "Fixing our broken tax code is one of the main reasons I'm running for president," he said. "I've been saying from the beginning of this campaign how ridiculous, complex, and yes, unfair the tax system is. It is. It's an unfair system. And so complex that few people understand it. Fortunately, I understand it." Interestingly, Trump's tax plan does not address the loopholes he took advantage of in his 1995 return.

Trump also compared the economic atmosphere of the early 1990s to the Great Depression of the 1930s, saying that was the only time period that was worse economically in the country. He said that the Great Recession of the late 2000s was not quite as bad as the early 1990s.

"I was able to use the tax laws of this country and my business acumen to dig out of the real estate mess, you would call it a depression, when few others were able to do what I did,"
TRUMP: I 'brilliantly used' tax laws to pay as little as possible - Business Insider

Yes, he's working for us now.. Yes, he's going to fix the system that so benefited him, yes, he's brilliant (or was it his accountant..) for taking advantage of the "great depression" of the early 1990s, etc. etc.
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#17
And, as people suggested, he could have made his returns public:
  1. To prove the NYT wrong
  2. To show that he is "brilliant" at paying the least amount of taxes, as he claims.
Since he has still not made his tax returns public, we must assume the NYT is right and there is likely something even worse in the returns. What, well perhaps this:

Quote:Trump has refused to publicly release his tax returns, a simple transparency measure adopted by candidates in both parties to demonstrate the integrity of their personal finances. The tax documents published by the Times make clear once again that Trump’s public presentation and real life diverge remarkably. At the time of this tax return, after all, Trump was promoting a career renaissance, not a near-billion-dollar loss. “He has reduced his personal debt—loans guaranteed with his own signature—from $975 million to $115 million,” Trump biographer Ed Klein told Newsday the year before.

In 1995, he negotiated a deal to offload his failing investment in the Plaza Hotel to a Saudi prince that included the cancellation of $125 million in debt. He sold his failing casinos to the public that summer, so he was no longer responsible for their debt, and used some of the money he raised to pay down nearly $36 million in additional personal debt. He also received a $1 million salary and a $3 million loan from the new public corporation. (The company would eventually declare bankruptcy in 2004, and again in 2009.)

All that, including debt forgiven, should be treated as income in the US tax system, with Trump on the hook for the appropriate tax payments. But it appears that whatever income he received was eclipsed by his losses, at least some of which appear to have been carried forward from previous years, suggesting the magnitude is far larger than the net figure of $916 million.
Donald Trump's leaked 1995 tax return raises these big, unanswered questions — Quartz
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#18
And here is Australian fund manager John Hempton:

According to the New York Times the losses came
Quote:... through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
There is an issue here.

Donald Trump did not repay all the debt associated with those investments.

Either
  • the loss is a real loss and the Donald was really was out of pocket by $916 million (in which case he has legitimate NOLs)
  • or the loss was passed on to someone else by The Donald defaulting on debt - in which case Donald Trump should be assessed for income from debt forgiveness.
After all if the debt is forgiven it is not Donald Trump's loss. The loss is borne by the person who lent Donald money and did not get it back.

That - clearly stated by example - is why most income tax systems assess debt forgiveness as income.

--

Okay - I do not know whether Donald Trump had the wherewithal in 1995 to bear $916 million of losses personally. But I doubt it. (If he did his financial career is different from what is popularly accepted.)

So the alternative is the debt was forgiven in some way. But then the story the New York Times is running is wrong - because the $916 million of losses would not have survived the debt forgiveness and hence would have wiped out his NOLs and thus he would not be allowed to shelter his income for the next 18 years.

Unless that is there is an avoidance scheme the New York Times has not worked out. Those schemes go by the name of "debt parking".

Debt parking

Here is how debt parking works. Suppose the debtor (in this case The Donald) is going to get his debt cancelled for (say) 1c in the dollar. When he gets the debt wiped out the debtor (ie The Donald) will have to report assessable income equal to the debt wiped out (in this case 99 percent of $916 million).

The alternative though is for the debtor to set up a dummy party. The dummy party might be his wife or children or some company or trust set up by them or more likely some completely opaque offshore trust.

And that dummy party goes and buys the debt for say 1.1 cents in the dollar. Then they just sit there.

They don't force the debtor (ie The Donald) to repay. They don't make a profit or loss on the debt. And because the debtor never has his debt forgiven he never gets the assessment on debt forgiveness and he gets to keep his NOLs even though the losses did not come out of his pocket.

Every tax system worth its salt has some rules on "effective debt forgiveness" to prevent debt parking. And - from my experience which is now over twenty years old - none of them work entirely.

Now if Donald really has all those tax losses its pretty clear that the debt must be parked somewhere.

There is a vehicle out there (say an offshore trust or other undisclosed related party effectively controlled by Donald Trump) - which owns over $900 million in debt and is not bothering to collect it.

I do not have the time or energy to find that vehicle. But it is there. Now that this blog has gone public journalists are going to look for it.

There is a Pulitzer prize for whoever finds it. Just give me a nod at the acceptance ceremony.
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#19
And there isn't exactly a rags to riches story behind Trump either..

Quote:Because as rich as the Republican presidential nominee is, his stewardship of the $200 million real estate empire he took control of four decades ago has failed to keep pace with either the general real estate market or the economy as a whole.

Trump has frequently put a dollar amount on the “small loan” he mentioned Monday: $1 million. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton got under his skin at the first presidential debate last week by using the figure $14 million. Either number misses a key point. The loan had little to do with the main source of Trump’s wealth, which was the real estate and construction company his father had built over a number of decades. Trump took over running that company in 1974, at age 28, when it was worth approximately $200 million, according to a contemporaneous New York Times article.

The vast majority of Trump’s wealth today flows from that initial nest egg, which he and his four siblings eventually inherited when their father died in 1999. What’s more, given the size of that original fortune, Trump has actually underperformed both the stock market as well as the real estate market.

Had Trump taken his share of what would become his father’s inheritance and put it into an index fund matching the S&P 500 back in 1974, it would have been worth $3 billion today. Had he put the $200 million that Fortune magazine determined he was worth in 1982 into that same index fund, he would be worth more than $8 billion today.

And had that $200 million gone into the broad real estate market, it would be worth more than $20 billion today.
Riches-to-Riches Trump Spins Fake Horatio Alger Tale | Huffington Post
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#20
Good luck to that..

Quote:Conservative media are attempting to deflect attention from the revelation that GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump took a $916 million loss in 1995 that might have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for 18 years by saying that that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and former president Bill Clinton did “the same thing” by claiming a “$700,000 loss” on their 2015 tax return.

The claim, which originated with a pseudonymous Reddit poster and has already spread to Fox News, fails to note that while the Clintons’ 2015 return shows that they did have a roughly $700,000 capital loss carried over from a prior year, that loss originates with the financial crash of 2008, and they received only a $3,000 deduction for those losses and paid $3.2 million in federal income taxes in 2015.
Right-Wing Media Faceplant In Rush To Accuse The Clintons Of Doing "The Same Thing As Trump" On Taxes
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