Tag: tax returns
Trump Paid Little Tax While Claiming Huge Losses And Dubious Deductions

Trump Paid Little Tax While Claiming Huge Losses And Dubious Deductions

On Tuesday evening, the House Ways and Means Committee voted 24 to 16 to release information it has obtained on Donald Trump’s tax returns. Some of that information has already been made available to the public. The report shows that Trump, while running as a successful billionaire, reported massive losses on his business dealings in the years just before entering the White House.

The information released to the public includes the years 2015 through 2020. In that first year, Trump claims almost $77 million loss in the form of “other income” and claims a $21 million charitable contribution in the form of a “conservation easement.” As Laura Clawson reported back in 2020, that easement was actually part of a shady real estate deal in which Trump used one of his typically overvalued assessments to turn a money-losing golf property into a tax break that he could spread out over years of returns. That’s just one in a long list of things that the House committee found questionable in Trump’s 2015 return.

In all, over the six years of returns, Trump reported making money only in 2018 and 2019. He used a combination of reported losses and questionable deductions to keep his tax bills to $750 in 2016, $750 in 2017, and $0 in 2020. Trump did pay $641,935 in 2015, but don’t worry. He still has a “claim for refund” filed for that year based on a claim that he was owed more for “historic restoration.” If that claim is successful, it will return that 2015 money to Trump.

Trump’s taxes were kept low by two factors: reported losses and those big “charitable deductions.” That didn’t just include Trump’s big $21 million “conservation” deduction (generated by theoretically turning the entire property into home lots, assigning a $2 million per value to those lots, then valuing Trump’s contribution as if he had donated 10 of these nonexistent lots).

The nature of Trump’s reported losses is itself more than a little questionable. For example, in 2015, Trump reported that he made money from income, interest, dividends, capital gains, and other gains. Those last two added up to $43 million. Still, he ended up reporting a net loss after reporting $76 million in losses as “other income.” That huge loss was mostly a carryover of reported operating losses in previous years—losses that Trump would keep pressing forward to erase potential income year after year.

Overall, here’s what Trump reported as income year by year.

TRUMP'S REPORTED INCOME

This gives Trump a reported $54 million loss over these six years. In those years when he did pay taxes, he paid effectively four percent of his reported income in 2018, and three percent in 2019. The 2015 numbers involved paying taxes that carried over from the previous year, but Trump is still asking the IRS to reduce that year to no more than $750.

In the short time the returns have been available to the House committee, they’ve identified a number of issues with each year of the returns. That includes not just multiple questionable charitable deductions, but a lot of deductions that are reported as large “cash” payments for which there doesn’t appear to be documentation. The committee also notes the use of Trump’s 500+ sole proprietorship businesses as a means of reporting everyday costs of living, and some expensive hobbies, as if they are legitimate business deductions.

Trump also appears to have written off over $2 million in property taxes as an income deduction; the committee notes that New York law caps that deduction at $10,000.

What’s also striking is that in every single year, including 2018, Trump’s core businesses—his golf courses, hotels, and real estate—operated at a reported loss. If Donald Trump actually makes money at anything, it’s not any of the areas in which he brags about being a success. In his best year, Trump reported that he lost $11 million on real estate.

Whether the discrepancies in Trump’s taxes will lead to fines or charges of tax fraud isn’t certain. What is certain is that with an incoming Republican majority in the House, any investigation into Trump is likely to be completely discarded.

All other presidential candidates over the last two decades have released their own returns during the campaign, but Trump did not. Though the House has a legal right to review the returns of anyone, obtaining these returns involved a multi-year court battle with Trump objecting and appealing at every possible stage to delay the delivery of the returns to the Congress. He almost managed to outlast the Congress … but he didn’t quite make it.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Ivanka Trump

Tax Revelations Renew Scrutiny Of Ivanka’s Shady Business Deals

White House adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump was recently implicated in a massive New York Times report detailing Donald Trump's tax returns and the minuscule $750 he paid in federal income tax during two recent tax years.

Ivanka was specifically accused of illegally receiving nearly $750,000 in payments from her father that he was able to write off as "consulting" fees.

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Why Democrats Worry About Bernie Sanders — And Should

Why Democrats Worry About Bernie Sanders — And Should

So Bernie Sanders, self-anointed scourge of the malign influence of “millionaires and billionaires” on American politics, is himself a millionaire. Firmly ensconced in the top one percent of income earners in the United States. Which you’ve got to admit is pretty funny. Only in America, as comedians like to say.
Except to Bernie, of course. Poking fun at himself isn’t one of the Vermont socialist’s strengths as a politician. His recently-released tax returns showed that he earned more than a million dollars in 2016 and 2017 due largely to royalties on his book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. Which in itself is somewhat ironic. Some revolution.
Why, there are big league relief pitchers who earned less than Bernie Sanders last year — although very few successful ones.
So he had to know he was going to get a hard time about it. Self-deprecating humor was definitely the way to go. Sanders, however, got defensive. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he snapped at reporters who asked him about it. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
Wrong answer.
Although still testy, Sanders did better the other night on a Fox News town hall, continuing to attack the unfairness of our “absurd” tax code that lets major corporations pay no income tax at all, and ultimately turning the tables. “Why don’t you get Donald Trump up here and ask him how much he paid in taxes?” he challenged the network’s interlocutors.
Good question.
Also, not going to happen.
And never mind that Sen. Sanders own refusal to release his income tax records during the 2016 presidential campaign helped give Trump cover for hiding his. Few Americans begrudge Bernie his success. Moreover, Sanders and his wife paid a 26 percent effective tax rate in 2018, no doubt far higher than Trump. And would end up paying considerably more if his own policies were adopted.
Some Trump voters are just now awakening to the deep fraudulence of the president’s vaunted tax cuts, which delivered vast benefits to the fat cats Bernie has long assailed, and little or nothing to them. Sanders’ income won’t be an issue in the 2018 race unless his petulance makes it one.
Ah, but therein lies the problem. To hear Bernie’s impassioned supporters tell it, he’s the only Democratic candidate who can unify the working class and put together a powerful coalition to defeat Trump.
And wouldn’t it be lovely to think so? I’m not quite as old as Bernie, but I’ve been hearing people like him prate about this imaginary uprising since Woodstock. That storied exercise in mob psychology took place exactly a half century ago, in August 1969, for those of you keeping score at home. (Me, I was in Dublin visiting the tomb of Jonathan Swift.) Today, even the movie is unendurable.
Writing in The Nation, Eric Alterman reminds readers of Bernie’s history as a classic hippie left-winger, losing several statewide elections in Vermont during the Seventies on a platform calling “for the nationalization of pretty much every industry in America, together with a 100 percent income tax on America’s top earners.”
Alterman adds that “Sanders was still a socialist in 1980, when he served as an elector for the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which favored the abolition of the US military budget and proclaimed itself in solidarity with both Cuba and Iran at a time when the latter held 52 Americans hostage.”
There’s more. Much more. Bernie in Managua, Nicaragua with Sandinista President Daniel Ortega as a crowd chants “the Yankee will die.” Bernie on his Soviet honeymoon in 1988, shirtless and singing “This Land is Your Land” with a bunch of Russians. According to journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who has seen it, Republicans have a book of oppo research documenting such incidents that’s two feet thick. There are videotapes. 
For very good historical reasons, most Democrats are unwilling to go there. Almost needless to say, Republicans, much less Trump, won’t be so shy. One friend privately describes this dilemma as “a real Catch 22. The things that primary voters need to know about him are precisely the things I feel proscribed from saying. My honest opinion is that he’d be destroyed in a general election.”
Mine too. Bernie’s seeming unwillingness to explain himself or admit error don’t help. As Alterman points out, Sanders has evolved over the years into “a typical New Deal–style liberal or European social democrat.” But he can’t erase, and won’t explain, his past.
Sure Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are socialist programs. So is the public library for that matter. “Medicare for All” sounds like a fine aspirational goal, although getting it through Congress appears impossible.  
Nevertheless, calling yourself a “Socialist” and talking about a “revolution” remain deeply suspect to most American voters.
As a presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders makes a fine Senator from Vermont. 
They’re Coming For Your Taxes, Donnie

They’re Coming For Your Taxes, Donnie

It’s almost April 15 and the American people want Donald Trump’s receipts.

On the second Saturday in April, organizers are planning marches in Washington, D.C. and dozens of other cities across the U.S. to call on the president to release his tax returns. Given the improving weather and polls that suggest that about 3 out of 4 Americans want to see Donnie’s tax returns, these marches will likely mark the second largest protests of the new, but seemingly endless, Trump Administration.

House Republicans have blocked five recent efforts from the Democratic side of the aisle to force the release of Trump’s returns — the latest being a party-line vote in the House Ways and Means Committee against a measure that would have directed the Treasury Department to provide the lower house of Congress with his returns, along with other financial information from the president.

Why?

That’s the question I keep asking myself, considering that even many Republican voters continue to tell pollsters that they want more transparency (and less tweeting) from the Commander-in-Tweet.

GOP “media guy” and compulsive Trump critic Rick Wilson keeps trying to remind his fellow Republicans of the possibly irreparable consequences of standing by a president who at least seems content to appear as if he is hiding multiple cancers on his presidency.

“In 1974, the GOP lost 49 House and 8 Senate seats,” Wilson tweeted. “They were branded as defending a corrupt, criminal Presidency.”

So why not try to get ahead of the crooked curve a bit and say you’re doing it because you’re sure the president has nothing to hide? Then, either way, you made the right call. Heck, you could even note that you’re just getting on board with a promise that Trump made dozens of times during the campaign.

Richard Painter was the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush Administration from 2005 to 2007. Currently, he’s the vice chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and teaches law at the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities, where he will be a speaker at Tax March MN, calling for an end to dark money in politics in addition to the tax documents from Trump that every president since Richard Nixon has released.

I asked Professor Painter why nearly all elected Republicans refuse to join the American people in demanding basic transparency. His answer is simple: Fear.

“They don’t want to get a primary challenge,” he told me.

It’s a fear that’s grounded in reality.

Trump’s social media guru unabashedly called for a primary challenge of Freedom Caucus member Rep. Justin Amash on Saturday. And Rep. Mark Sanford told The Post and Courier of Charleston that Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, came to him and said, “‘The president asked me to look you square in the eyes and to say that he hoped that you voted ‘no’ on [the American Health Care Act] so he could run [a primary challenger] against you in 2018.”

Coincidentally, Sanford is one of two House Republicans who have publicly called for Trump to release his tax returns.

Painter told me that the fear is visible on Capitol Hill.

“Last Thursday, they had a hearing on some other government transparency issues,” he told me. “The minute I start bringing up Trump, and the Democrats were asking me questions, the Republicans were all ducking out of the hearing. They had three separate Republicans handle the gavel just to chair this thing. None of them wanted to be in the room. They don’t want to argue with me. Not a single Republican wanted to argue with me about a single thing I had to say about Trump.”

And Painter has had a lot to say about Trump.

In a Los Angeles Times‘ op-ed, he explained exactly why Trump’s returns are so crucial to finding out who the president might be beholden to, including foreign interests. He believes that in addition to using its subpoena powers to get Trump’s tax returns, Congress should amend Form 278, which is required of all presidential candidates, “to require more disclosure of debts, capital infusions and revenues of corporations, LLCs and other entities controlled by high-ranking office holders,” who are subject to conflict of interest laws.

Only Republicans currently have the power to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and the professor believes that pressure on GOP reps back in their districts as the 2018 election nears may result in increasing, yet quiet, calls for an independent investigation and even a possible demand for Trump’s returns.

Painter is also part of the legal team suing Trump over violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. But that level of corruption is minor compared to what he thinks the president or his associates may be hiding when it comes to possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, which he believes could be the biggest scandal in American politics in at least half a century.

“This scandal is much more dangerous than Watergate because Watergate didn’t involve foreign adversaries conducting spying activities in the United States,” he told me. “That was a break-in by some low-class burglars who weren’t even any good at being burglars, whereas the break-in here at the DNC was a very sophisticated operation.”

The release of Trump’s tax returns would indicate that the president takes this scandal seriously instead of going into what Painter calls “coverup mode.”

Transparency is the demand and Painter believes it’s necessary for politics to help ordinary people.

“I’m concerned with the ethics of this administration,” he told me, when I asked why he decided to participate in the march. “I’m concerned with the ethics of Washington in general. We need to get the campaign finance system cleaned up because that affects both political parties.”

But first we have the small matter of figuring out if the president or anyone around him might have committed some high crimes and/or misdemeanors.

“There is some evidence that there was somebody in the United States collaborating with the Russians at the time the Russians were conducting a spying activity and then selectively disseminating some of the information they discovered through Wikileaks. And there were some Americans, apparently, who were collaborating with that,” he told me. “I do describe that as treason.”

These are serious charges. And Trump continues to fuel the speculation by acting is if he has more to hide in his tax returns than Al Capone ever did.