Wednesday, October 5, 2016

IS TRUMP SMART FOR PAYING NO FEDERAL INCOME TAX – PART II

A portion of Deplorable Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return has been leaked, showing that he reported a net loss of almost $1 Billion!
 
No wonder the serial liar doesn’t want to release his tax returns!
 
This suggests that Trump is a failed and losing businessman, and not the savvy success that his ego needs you, and his Presidential campaign wants you, to believe.
 
To be fair, not that Trump has ever been fair to anyone, this is only a small part of one tax return.  We do not know what has caused this huge loss, nor do we know what he has reported as income in previous or subsequent years.
 
What we do know is that if Trump avoided paying income tax in multiple years because of this huge loss it was not because he was smart and used special or obscure tax loopholes to “play the rigged system”.  His tax avoidance is the result of the professionals who prepared his returns applying a legitimate, and actually logical, tax deduction – the Net Operating Loss deduction.
 
Trump certainly does not know any more about tax law than he does about anything else, which is not much.  (What he does know is how to screw investors, lenders, contractors, vendors, employees, and customers)   
 
The Net Operating Loss concept is not a special tax preference, nor is it an inequity in the otherwise mucking fess that is our US Tax Code, that needs to be changed, reformed, or removed.  It is, as I said above, a legitimate and actually logical tax concept. 
 
I share the concerns of fellow tax blogger Joe Kristan as expressed in “Tax Roundup,10/3/16: Why the tax law needs net operating losses. And: Trump loss linkapalooza!” -
 
I do have an interest in tax policy, and I fear and expect a bunch of stupid proposals to further restrict and complicate net operating loss use just because Trump might have gotten to use them.”
 
BTW – Joe’s above referenced post has an excellent explanation of Net Operating Loss and links to other blog posts on the subject.
 
As I have said before, there is nothing wrong with legally using the existing tax law to reduce or altogether avoid income tax liability.  If a wealthy person pays no income tax the fault is not with that person, or his or her tax professional, but with the idiots in Congress who have totally FU-ed the US Tax Code.  The solution is to totally shred the existing Code and rewrite it from scratch.
 
TTFN
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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