I paid more than $5,000 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017.
Mango Mussollini paid $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. We don’t have his 2018 and 2019 returns, yet.
How about you?
Please share widely!
Reality-based commentary on politics.
Me too, and if I had my way the first 30K or so would not be taxable at all. Those struggling to get by should not have a tax liability.
About 3x as much as the Cheeto
This is another good example of why a steeply graduated income tax has little or no impact on wealth concentration.
These filings from Mr. Trump are just another example of how arbitrary “income” is.
We know he made 400K in 2017, but does donating it all eliminate his tax obligation on it, and since he I believe donated it to NPS should we count it as part of his overall contribution to Uncle Sam?
The steeply progressive income tax had a very major effect on wealth concentration between the 1920s and the 1950s.
And today, even with all of the deductions, the top income bracket pays on average 24% of its income in income taxes.
There are too many loopholes and gimmicks for sure, but throwing in the towel on the progressive income tax is certainly not the answer.
The system is rigged and sadly, many Democrats played a part. While Republicans who rigged it could do so out in the open, brag about it, be proud of “starving the beast”, the Democrats who rigged it and continue to rig it do so behind the scene and by lying to the American workers that it’s not what it appears to be.
I didn’t say “throw in the towel”, I said that it is not effective at solving the wealth concentration issue.
The primary effect of a steeply progressive income tax is raise the barrier between the very wealthy and the rest of us.
There were other taxes during the period you mention that were more effective at preventing the excessive wealth concentration that we see today. The capital gains tax (which primarily affects the wealthy) was 25% from 1943-1967, and went up to 35% during the 1970s. The gift and estate tax, paid ONLY by the wealthy, was significantly higher than it is today.
The challenge today is recapture the obscene share of the nation’s wealth that is currently held by wealthiest 0.1% of our nation’s household. A steeply progressive income tax will have little or no impact on that — as Donald Trump’s tax returns show us.
If the rate of the highest income tax margin is, say, 70% then our very wealthiest households will simply adjust their portfolios to produce less income.
To the extent that this reporting is valuable, it is NOT the political impact of revealing the amount of taxes that Mr. Trump paid. His supporters will only cheer that he so successfully gamed the “rigged” IRS.
The value of this reporting is that it allows attorneys and reporters to cross-check TWENTY YEARS of tax filings against his enormous number of contemporaneous loan applications, disclosures, and similar documents — all of them signed under penalty of perjury.
Just to pick one tiny microexample, pretty much every mortgage application requires the applicant to enumerate assets and net worth. If there is a significant difference between that enumeration and his federal tax filing for that year, that difference is felony fraud.
Similar cross-checking will surely be done between these federal filings and his state and local filings for the same period.
Mr. Trump has fought furiously to block the release of this information. I suggest that he is unafraid of the political response.
I think he knows that he has a twenty year history of fraud — and I think he knows that THAT is a fatal weakness.
Monday’s NYT Headline : President’s taxes chart chronic losses, audit battles and income tax avoidance
It appears that the real definition of “hoax” is the “business mogul” America saw on The Apprentice. Dan Rather
An actual billionaire living in New York once told me : “Trump isn’t rich. Trump isn’t a billionaire. He’s a clown living on credit. Rick Wilson
Joe Biden paid $92,000 in federal income tax in 2016.
In those past 20 years, 2017-1997, we had 16 years of Democrats in the White House. If the system is rigged, and clearly it is, are we willing to hold Presidents Obama and Clinton responsible to any degree? Trump has already admitted to taking advantage of a rigged system so his supporters will say “Yeah, and so what?, what did your guys do to make it fair?” By the way, what ever happened to the Clinton Foundation and their involvement with the Panama Papers?
Maybe, just maybe, President Biden will lead the presidency back to the path of Jimmy Carter and hold it up as a position of public service, not personal enrichment.
That lie is decomposing in the same rubbish dump as all the other right-wing lies about the Clinton family — perhaps near the Vince Foster carcass.
Each mention like this comment provides another thump on its dead chest — it’s unlikely to come back to life in spite of your best efforts.
Okay… what ever happened to the Clinton Foundation and their involvement with the Panama Papers?
If that interests you, then go find out. It won’t take more than about two minutes on Google to learn the results. Here’s a hint — the first two pages of hits will tell you a lot about whether or not there’s a story there.
We do know that “donations are down” – gee, one wonders why if said donations were not to gain favor with a potential president of the USA…. and their CEO raked in a salary of $445,342 in 2018. Nothing illegal here, just as there was nothing illegal with McConnell refusing to appoint Garland and now rushing the appointment of Coney Barrett.
You see Tom, to not appear to be as hypocritical as them, we need to hold ourselves and our elected leaders to a higher standard.
As I recall, even Bernie Sanders was critical of the Clinton’s involvement in the Panama Papers…….are we going to paint Senator Sanders with the Rush Limbaugh Brush as a consequence?>
Thanks for commenting
It is always a pleasure to educate the uniformed.
Not so prickly about personal attacks when you’re making them, I see.
Part of me wonders whether Trump actually cheated, or if these revelations say more about how atrocious our tax code is than they do about him. In other words, is it possible that he took every legal deduction available and this is how the math worked?
Let’s get real here!
Since Nixon, ALL presidential candidates EXCEPT TRUMP, have VOLUNTARILY released their tax returns.
That’s unresponsive to Christopher’s comment.
I think it’s a near certainty that pretty much every individual claim is legal. The same is true for most of the filings of pretty much every other mob kingpin — that’s what they get in exchange for whatever they give their lawyers and accountants.
It’s the next level of constraints where Mr. Trump’s issues most likely reside. For example, in today’s piece in the NYTimes, two items struck me as interesting in this regard:
I think the bigger revelation is how poor his cash flow is which made him think a presidential campaign was just the publicity stunt he needed to extend his brands shelf life another 20 years to cover these losses and protect his kids from the underwriters when they want their money back. Instead, he won. And in doing so got access to a four year reprieve on a lot of these costs, perhaps thanks in part to favorable payouts from foreign lobbyists and companies he deregulated. Still does not change the fact that his golf courses and hotels lose an extraordinary amount of money no two day Turkish convention can make into a profit. More so thanks to this pandemic, which has made an actual innovator and job creator like Jeff Bezos* even more wealthy while a two bit slum lord like Don is going to be stuck filing personal bankruptcy after his presidency. Don’s long con has to end in November.
*Jeff is still an asshole to his workers and the planet and I dislike him, but it’s hard to argue with the fact that he saw a niche and blew it into the worlds biggest company. He’s a genuine innovator. Trump bet the farm on mid century entertainment that was already out of fashion when he got elected.
I think the bigger revelation is how poor his cash flow is which made him think a presidential campaign was just the publicity stunt he needed to extend his brands shelf life another 20 years to cover these losses and protect his kids from the underwriters when they want their money back. Instead, he won. And in doing so got access to a four year reprieve on a lot of these costs, perhaps thanks in part to favorable payouts from foreign lobbyists and companies he deregulated. Still does not change the fact that his golf courses and hotels lose an extraordinary amount of money no two day Turkish convention can make into a profit. More so thanks to this pandemic, which has made an actual innovator and job creator like Jeff Bezos* even more wealthy while a two bit slum lord like Don is going to be stuck filing personal bankruptcy after his presidency. Don’s long con has to end in November.
*Jeff is still an jerk to his workers and the planet and I dislike him, but it’s hard to argue with the fact that he saw a niche and blew it into the worlds biggest company. He’s a genuine innovator. Trump bet the farm on mid century entertainment that was already out of fashion when he got elected.
Since there are no filings or disclosures pertaining to his net worth or wealth, we’re left to speculate about all this.
We know that his “poor” cash flow greatly reduced his exposure to taxes. We know that his various assets like his golf course and hotels lose an extraordinary amount of money.
We don’t, however, know much wealth was invested in them in the first place. We also don’t know the sources of that wealth.
There is very strong evidence (cf https://forensicnews.net/2020/01/03/trump-deutsche-bank-loans-underwritten-by-russian-state-owned-bank-whistleblower-told-fbi/) that Mr. Trump and his family corporations laundered dirty Russian money using Deutsche Bank and VTB (with its subsidiaries). The Washington Post was covering such activities more than a year ago (https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/trumps-businesses-are-full-of-dirty-russian-money-the-scandal-is-thats-legal/2019/03/29/11b812da-5171-11e9-88a1-ed346f0ec94f_story.html).
When the purpose is to launder money, the resulting “poor” cash flow is often the entire point of the exercise. The fact that the resulting losses are tax deductible is an indictment of our tax code — not to mention the collusion of William Barr and the DoJ in ignoring it.
I don’t expect any personal bankruptcy from Mr. Trump. I think he will either be incarcerated, living in exile in Russia or a Russian protectorate, or he will be President for Life.
I think the next few months are going to be VERY different from anything America has ever experienced — no matter how they ultimately turn out.
While clearly not on the same scale, I worked for one employer who played the cash flow game as Trump probably does. He has the distinction of being the largest personal bankruptcy in the Western New York county where I lived at the time. Everything was leveraged. One of my co-workers spent most of her day on the phone with creditors, buying time, offering partial payment, whatever it took to keep them on the line. The individual himself was a charming man who actually bailed me out of a tough situation once, no questions asked. He was also tied in with politicians and one of the wealthiest families in the county. I was in my early 20’s at the time and unaware of the scams I was part of. Money flowed into the company I was “president” of and money flowed out. I received a decent salary, company car, and never gave it much of a a thought, and if I did, they just blew more smoke my way.
For example, the small company I ran received a retainer each month for $2,000 (about $5,000 today) from a company that we did absolutely nothing for. When I asked about it, I was told we were on retainer for giving them advice on media purchasing. I could find no such records of any requests for information or any reports given. It was explained to me that the records were probably lost and I should write up one, send it, and be done with it for the year….and I did. My hunch is that this was all money laundering from the wealthy family to a former US congressman. (Republican)
Trump’s advantage here is that he seems to have successfully insulated himself from leaks within his organization by relying on family and very close friends.
One can only wonder if one of them will ever flip.
Trump hates being a failure and a loser. The first segment of tomorrow’s debate will be about the candidates’ records, so I think Biden should turn to Trump and say the following: