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Trump must be more stupid than a stone to allow a whole election to be
stolen right from under his nose by a female!

He's a failure in business and a tax cheat too!

Trump Is a Bad Businessman. Is He a Tax Cheat, Too?

The latest revelations provide fresh grounds for concern that he has
violated revenue laws.
May 9, 2019
Credit...Illustration by Jeffrey Henson Scales, photographs by Doug
Mills/The New York Times and Getty Images

By Lily Batchelder

Ms. Batchelder is a professor of law at the New York University School of
Law.
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The latest bombshell Times story on the president’s tax history confirms
what we already suspected: Donald Trump is a terrible businessman. Despite inheriting more than $400 million and being bailed out by his father at critical junctures, he managed to lose (or at least claim tax losses) of
more than $1 billion over a decade.

The latest story also shows how we do a terrible job of adequately taxing
the wealthy. The 400 richest Americans often pay tax at lower rates than
the middle class because so much income from wealth is taxed at low or
zero rates.

But perhaps most important, the story reinforces the need for a
congressional investigation of the president’s tax returns.

President Trump is not just a run-of-the-mill multimillionaire, paying
taxes at a low rate. As the Times has documented, there is ample evidence
that his father’s estate — of which he was the executor — engaged in tax evasion and outright fraud, failing to pay about $500 million in estate
taxes.

Other reports have documented numerous instances where Mr. Trump has taken sketchy or unlawful tax positions. His former attorney Michael Cohen effectively suggested during his congressional testimony that Mr. Trump
engaged in tax fraud and insurance fraud.

The latest revelations about the president’s eye-popping tax losses
provide fresh grounds for concern that he has violated tax laws: Claiming
large tax losses is one of a handful of positions taxpayers must
automatically disclose to the I.R.S. as potentially abusive tax shelters.

The president claims that all his relevant tax returns have been audited
or are under audit now. But even if true, this provides little comfort.
The I.R.S. is so under-resourced that even when it does audit high-wealth individuals, it may miss violations of the law, or worse. Fred Trump’s
estate is a case in point.

President Trump also is not a run-of-the-mill wealthy man because he is,
well, the president of the United States. He has vast power and influence. There is ample reason to fear that conflicts of interest have infected his approach to tax policy.

When campaigning, Mr. Trump promised to close tax loopholes based on his
expert knowledge of them. But instead, the 2017 tax bill seemed designed
to lower taxes on him and his family through special carve-outs.
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The bill lowered the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent. But it
was far more generous to the wealthy who, like the president, structure
their businesses to pay tax on a so-called pass-through basis. They gained
a whopping 20 percent deduction on their income.

While the bill placed limits on wealthy taxpayers claiming this deduction, there was a special carve-out for real estate — the main source of Mr.
Trump’s wealth. As a result, the bill cut the top rate on people who, like
the president, own pass-through businesses in the real estate industry all
the way to 29.5 percent.

And that’s just the start. The 2017 bill also repealed the “like-kind
exchange” rule for all property except, you guessed it, real estate. This
rule allows the wealthy to indefinitely defer paying tax on capital gains
when they change their investment portfolio but do not liquidate.

One positive feature of the 2017 tax law was a new limit on the
deductibility of interest payments, which helps reduce the tax bias in
favor of debt-financed investment. One might assume that Mr. Trump, as the self-proclaimed “king of debt,” would be hurt financially by such a limit.
But in another happy twist for the Trump family, real estate developers
can elect out of the limitation entirely.

Subsequent Treasury regulations have also been great news for real estate developers. For example, the bill’s Opportunity Zone provision
dramatically reduces or eliminates capital gains taxes due on funds
invested in designated areas. According to the president, his daughter
Ivanka pushed very hard for this provision. But while purportedly designed
to stimulate investment in poor areas, these regulations inexplicably
gutted some provisions restricting the tax perk to new business activity.
These generous tax breaks are now going to the toniest neighborhoods in
some cities and prime beachfront property in New Jersey, benefiting Mr.
Trump’s son-in-law in the process.



To be sure, there is a limit on how much information one can glean from
tax returns. But at a minimum, his returns would reveal more about the structure and extent of his holdings, and thus the extent to which he personally benefited from specific carve-outs in the 2017 tax bill. They
would also reveal whether the I.R.S. is appropriately enforcing the law
with regard to his returns.

The Ways and Means Committee has asked to confidentially examine the past
six years of Mr. Trump’s personal and business tax returns. Even though
this is clearly within Congress’s authority, the administration is
vociferously fighting the request.

The American people have a right to know whether the president has
violated the tax law or acted on conflicts of interest, and whether the
I.R.S. has adequately policed any such violations. But because Mr. Trump, unlike every other president since Richard Nixon, has refused to release
his tax returns, only Congress has the authority and ability to
investigate these questions. The courts should enforce this right.

Lily Batchelder, a professor of law at the New York University School of
Law, was majority chief tax counsel for the Senate Finance Committee from
2010 to 2014.



https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/trump-tax-returns.html

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