Ok. Lets be clear. Because this one comment here reflects the daily shenanigan's found in this sub. What exactly is being discussed? COVID? Wealthy people not paying their 'fair share' of taxes? Punishing the 'bad guys' for not paying their taxes? IRS doing a very poor job of auditing Trumps records? Serious people. As many people are disgusted with Trump, IRS is one weapon that can be turned against him. And the IRS is not bought and paid for by Trump. Should I be outraged by all of this? Some of this? Im not sure what I should be outraged over. If Im suppose to be pissed over rich people not paying taxes, quite frankly Im tired of Bezos/Amazon benefiting immensely from all of the government benefits it receives, such as having exponential growth from the 2 trillion dollar COVID bailout. Warren Buffett has added almost nothing to society. He is the biggest con man of them all. COVID? Im tired of the average Americans acting like complete idiots by not practicing the most basic and effective means to prevent transmission. There are plenty of reasons to rage over Trump. But faulting the guy for playing the system like every other wealthy person, which by the way, designed by every shitty politician out there.
As for what it means about Trump as a billionaire, it reminds me of a saying my father likes: it's not what you make but what you owe. Trump seems to exist financially in a highly-leveraged ether -- that by borrowing large amounts, buying large assets, making high revenues and running high operating costs, there is enough liquidity in all the transacting that the guy at the epicenter can live a billionaire's lifestyle even if his net worth never gets into the black. It's like walking -- a controlled fall. If he can maintain the walk long enough, he'll die before the whole thing crashes. I don't think it moves the election much. The finance and tax revelations are all too complicated for people and we will mostly seize on simplified implications. Trump doesn't pay his "fair share." Trump is a genius because he's so good at leveraging the tax code and financial vehicles. Trump is not a billionaire. Trump lives the billionaire life without having to be a billionaire. Or none of this matters because he appointed 3 conservative justices. You can pick whatever angle best fits your narrative. When Trump and Republican majorities in Congress were trying to get a tax overhaul through in 2017 that simplified the code and lowered rates, they decided they couldn't finish quickly enough in pursuing both goals. Its not an accident they jettisoned simplification and just focused on lower rates for the upper brackets.
Trump's IRS Chief Has Made Hundreds of Thousands from Trump Properties While In Office Charles Rettig, the Trump-appointed IRS Commissioner who has refused to release President Trump’s tax returns, has made hundreds of thousands of dollars renting out Trump properties while in office, according to documents obtained by CREW. Last year Rettig said it was his decision whether to turn over Trump’s tax returns to Congress, under the supervision of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. An analysis of Rettig’s personal financial disclosures for the last two years shows Rettig making $100,000 – $200,000 a year from two units at Trump International Waikiki. Trump made a detour to visit the property during a trip to Asia in his first year in office—a priceless promotional appearance for the business he still profits from as president. Rettig bought a 50% stake in the units in 2006, three years before the property opened, likely benefiting the future-president, whose company got 10% of total pre-sales. @Space Ghost - I haven't read your posts in a long time, but it looks like you still stink at posting almost as bad as Trump sucks at being President, even if you're ostensibly trolling.
Stop it dude. There are some SERIOUS concerns with this. The biggest is how massive in debt the dude is and foerign autocrats like Erdogan taking advantage of it and using it as leverage. That's avery troubling thing. Our president is compromised because of his personal debt.
I took a couple of things from reading the article. I long thought that Trump didn't want to release his tax returns because it would show losses as opposed to "yuge" gains. When I saw this stuff on facebook, I noticed most people talking about the $0 or $750 paid on federal income taxes. After reading the article, it appears most of those losses, which allowed him to pay no taxes (or rather, get tax refunds after paying some taxes) were for items spelled out in the tax code. So he utilized the tax code to his advantage. He's being audited so, hopefully, any of those deductions he took that tried to blur the line and aren't legitimate are found out (although I highly suspect he had a team of tax accountants and attorneys who told him it was OK, and are probably right." From the article: "Mr. Trump harvested that refund bonanza by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years. But to turn that long arc of failure into a giant refund check, he relied on some deft accounting footwork and an unwitting gift from an unlikely source — Mr. Obama. Until 2009, those coupons could be used to wipe away taxes going back only two years. But that November, the window was more than doubled by a little-noticed provision in a bill Mr. Obama signed as part of the Great Recession recovery effort. Now business owners could request full refunds of taxes paid in the prior four years, and 50 percent of those from the year before that." For the bolded part above, I'm not saying it's Obama's fault. What I think is these laws were setup to allow for small business owners to take deductions to help get them back on their feet and performing well (or to stay in business at all), but the bigger companies who can pay hundreds of thousands or millions to tax experts will literally crack the code to make it bend their way. Same thing happened with the stimulus bill Trump and the republicans passed this year. For example, I know a company ($400M+ revenue company) who is public and has nearly $200M in cash. This company laid off people to ensure the bottom line could be as successful as possible (public companies tend to do that). They applied and received a $17M tax refund from that stimulus bill (which I'm sure is meant to keep companies afloat and employees paid). They didn't really "need" the $17M, but their tax guy should have been fired if they didn't apply for it and get it. I think all politicians like these tax loop holes (a lot of the years where Trump paid 0 were under Obama), and just don't want to admit it. I would be much happier with a flat tax that was simple to do. I don't think it would ever pass though, because there are accountants relying on those jobs, and I'm sure they have their own lobbyists too. I personally don't see a lot here. I didn't vote for Trump in 2016. I'm just here to point out that there's a lot of people "avoiding" taxes, which isn't to be confused with "tax fraud". Tax avoidance is legal and what you pay tax accounts and tax lawyers for. Tax fraud is what you go to jail for.
Which is it? He is the wealthiest president ever elected? Or he is the most broke and compromised president ever? Show me one time where I have ever said Trump was a great president. Yes, I constantly criticize people who get caught up in the latest 'Trump scandal' that floats across their smart phone notification. Does it never cross your mind to think "well gee, last week my team was just criticizing Trump for being the wealthiest president. Maybe I should put more thought into this before I go into another rage fit". Go watch The Social Dilemma. You all are reactionary robots to your feeds.
He's the most broke president. Wtf are you talking about? I've routinely called Trump an utterly trash businesman who nutted out of a 413 million dollar penis? Did you even read the NYT report? Did you see all the loses he's accrued? When did I claim he was "wealthy"? Every time this board discusses his business acumen 99% of the members trash it. I really have no ****ing clue what you are talking about and now you are speaking out of your ass. Tell me what my "news feed" is.
The tax returns are real. The dems and the media think Americans are stupid and assume that average Americans don't know how corporations work or how wealth works. Trump doesn't have a billion dollars lying around, and he doesn't make a billion dollars a year. He owns assets that amount to 3 billion and he probably makes 15-30 million a year on average to which he's paid tens of millions of dollars in state and personal income taxes, but the media won't tell you that. Trump is a person and then there is the Trump Organization, that's who the media is "reporting" on, the organization. The same organization that was lambasted for bankruptcy in the 90s and came roaring back by Trump embracing the culture of the millennium, positioning himself as a pop culture icon and marketing himself as the guy that will put his name on anything, later going on to popularize the phrase "You're Fired!". During which time his corporation utilizing the tax code written by some of the same vampires that sit in the congress today. The organization experienced losses, according to the tax code his corporation was able to write off the losses, and he did. He took write-offs on his bankruptcies and ended up with negative federal tax rate. On top of that the Trump Organization employs a **** ton of people around the world, he's an international job creator. The media is sad and pathetic. I'm loving the tweets talking about how poor Trump is lol. He's so poor his company employs 20,000+ people, owns 100+ properties and operates 500 business internationally and he pays property taxes and payroll taxes LoL. Really dems, taxes again LoL
Trump also wouldn't even pass a basic secret clearance test to be in basic infantry in the military due to the amount of debt he has. Erdogan and Duterte have obviously leveraged Trump's debt against him. Have you been paying attention?
Most of his reductions in taxes are credits, which means they were either paid in another year, or via another entity and flowed through to his return. Additionally, real estate gets tons of bonus depreciation and stuff, which just means it'll get paid later. Also, IRS has already audited most of his stuff and found it OK. He probably gets audited every year
Trump Is Just Another Moocher The president is running out of time, and his tax returns just dispelled all his pretensions to wealth and sacrifice. David Frum Staff writer at The Atlantic This matters. Remember: Back in 2015, when Donald Trump announced his campaign for president, about one-third of Republicans and Republican-leaners condemned the distribution of wealth in the United States as unjust. Those class-aggrieved Republicans believed high-earners paid too little in tax and wanted taxes on corporations and rich people raised, not cut. Those were the Republicans who rejected Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz—and elevated Trump as the party nominee instead. Trump voters were more economically pessimistic than other Republicans. They were more racially aggrieved. They identified themselves as people who worked, who were mooched upon from below and exploited from above. Donald Trump spoke powerfully to those voters. He told them a story about corrupt elites, symbolized first by his Republican rivals, then by Hillary Clinton. He told them that he had gamed the system better than anyone. In July 2015, he boasted, “As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.” Now Trump was now offering to put his hard-won knowledge to work for put-upon voters. He alone would bring class justice to this country, redirecting the benefits from the super-rich to deserving people like themselves. On Fox & Friends that August, he complained about financiers avoiding taxes: “They should be taxed a fair amount of money,” he said. “They’re not paying enough tax.” He committed that when he got hold of power, he would sacrifice his own interests to look out for the people who had trusted him. When Trump at last delivered a tax plan in 2017, he insisted: “This is going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me. This is not good for me. … I think my accountants are going crazy right now,” he said of the plan that materialized in 2017. The highly politically aware always recognized these claims of wealth and sacrifice were preposterously false. But they were central to Trump’s messaging. Trump repeatedly insisted that the presidency had “cost me billions.” In a October 2018 call to Fox & Friends, he estimated the loss at $2 billion to $3 billion. At a press conference a year later, he upped the estimate of his sacrifice to $5 billion. Trump’s son Don Jr. compared the family’s sacrifices to the heroism honored at Arlington National Cemetery. In his book Triggered, he described his feelings on a visit to Arlington: “In that moment, I also thought of all the attacks we'd already suffered as a family, and about all the sacrifices we’d have to make to help my father succeed—voluntarily giving up a huge chunk of our business and all international deals to avoid the appearance that we were ‘profiting off the office.’” The definitive debunking of this lie now does two things. First, it melts Trump’s support a little more. Trump’s hopes for 2020 depended upon fantastic overperformance with white voters without college degrees. He’s lost so much support elsewhere that he must hold every last member of his core group. He doesn’t need to decline much among these voters to convert any faint hope of success into certainty of disaster. Second, and perhaps even more important, the ink-on-paper confirmation of Trump’s indebtedness, tax-dodging, and all-around crookedness will get into Trump’s head. His political project through the pandemic has been to mess with his opponents by hurling one crazy distraction after another. Now, suddenly, it’s his own decision loop that has been disrupted. On the pre-existing trajectory of the 2020 campaign, Trump was going to lose—and probably lose big. He needed something to happen either to help him or, more plausibly, to push the Biden camp into some mistake or misstep. Now, suddenly, the banana peels have been dumped beneath his own feet. Whatever initiative he possessed as the incumbent president, it’s suddenly vanished. Instead, every step threatens disaster. At a press conference on the afternoon the New York Times Trump tax story broke, he denounced as false the report that he paid only $750 in tax in 2017. Watch his face as he issued the denial, though, and you can see him belatedly foresee the follow-up question: “But can you give people an idea of how much you actually are paying?” Trump was visibly scrambled. Scrambled too are whatever plans Trump may have had for the first presidential debate tomorrow night. He may try to huff and puff—a tactic that might save the day if he were sitting on a lead. Instead, he’s trying to climb out of an 8-to-10 point deficit. Gravity is now pulling harder against him. For once in his life, Trump seems tongue-tied. His supporters, even those willing to be shameless, have been left desperately to contrive messages of their own. They are not doing a very good job, in part because they must worry about the line that Trump will eventually want them to take, when he finally announces a line. Not many days and hours remain, and Trump has abruptly lost almost any vestige of control of either the game or the clock. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...eturns-proves-he-just-another-moocher/616516/
LOL at all the trump supporters, either ignoring or defending trump's latest corruption. I get it, you spent the past five plus years supporting him and "owning" the libs". Each new example of corruption didn't matter. Each offensive thing he said and did. I get it, you don't want to admit you were (and still are) wrong. Hard to admit being wrong. So you keep defending him.
Actually the IRS is still auditing a 72 million dollar tax refund the IRS gave Trump which they believe was fraud and it's speculative but reporters are assuming that the audit will be on freeze untill he's out of office. So no you are pretty incorrect. Hence why Trump is always in "audit". It's more likely that the IRS is just waiting... Hence another reason Trump will try to stay president at all costs.
Can you honestly tell me that having a President in office that shows over $420,000,000 in PERSONAL debt that will be called upon in the next few years, as well as a President who shows over $70,000,000 profits coming from foreign interests originating in China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia is a GOOD thing?? You can honestly tell me you don't think that's a compromise to national security as well as a noose around the neck of a man who's job it is to put country above himself?? You think it's a good idea to keep a man in office that employed his own children as "consultants" as part of a shell game so they could take borrowed money, claim it as losses, and not pay taxes on it while their organization absorbed that money?? It's not about the $750 of FIT. That can be explained away through increased wages, re-appropriated profits, and depreciated assets. It's the PERSONAL DEBT that is incredibly worrisome, and downright criminal.
