In 1995, Trump reported a loss of nearly $916 million, and while this is certainly a staggering amount of money, reporting the loss is totally legal and above board. That kind of loss may have allowed him to legally (this is the key word) avoid federal income taxes for nearly twenty years. So what? It is legal, and Trump is a businessman. Trump’s campaign statement said that he “has a fiduciary responsibility to his business and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required.” Agreed. Do you know ANYONE who pays MORE tax than is legally required? I didn’t think so.
Everyone else is wrong in this situation. First, let’s tackle the New York Times. Why did they feel compelled to release records received under such mysterious circumstances? The newspaper claims first amendment protection and uses the “public service” argument, since so many Americans have been curious about Trump’s taxes. Yet other experts, including Trump’s own lawyer, says NYT broke the law by releasing taxes without the consent of the tax filer—and did so willfully: NPR reports that in early September, executive editor Dean Baquet told a Harvard crowd that he would “happily serve jail time” to publish Trump’s taxes. Funny how they showed up on his desk a month later; guess the temptation was just too much for Baquet to resist.
But the worst offender, as usual, is (drum roll) Hillary Clinton. Clinton mocked Trump in the first debate, eerily predicting the future by saying Trump was afraid the public would find out he paid no federal taxes. Her campaign has referred to Trump as a colossal business failure, and released a tax tool on their campaign website inviting the public to pretend to be Donald and calculate your taxes. The answer is always $0. For those of you that contributed to Hillary’s campaign, rest assured that your money is being spent on important things like this.
Companies register in the state of Delaware to legally save on taxes for income earned in the other 49 states. Trump has companies there, but so does Clinton, who, according to The Week, has ZFS Holdings to manage her millions in book and speaker revenues stemming from her post-Secretary of State days. And according to Bloomberg News, the multimillionaire Clintons have used multiple legal financial strategies like trusts and transfer of ownership to avoid paying estate tax, a popular strategy used by the “top one percent”. Funny that Bill and Hillary have always been in favor of an estate tax to keep the US from being dominated by inherited wealth–as long as it applies only to other people and not to them.
