The Tax Hoax!

[Dill]

Dems will spin this as chronic corruption and mismanagement.

LONG-CONCEALED RECORDS SHOW TRUMP’S CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president....

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s....

Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every business expense Mr. Trump claims to reduce his taxable income — for instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.

The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.

300 million in personal loans will come due in the next few years. T apparently gave Ivanka almost 800,000 as a gift and wrote it of as payment for "consulting"--when she was an employee of the Trump organization. Tax investigators have to be geniuses to sort all this out.

[Dill]

There's more:

Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Mr. Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. His properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.

At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the business. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.

Trump paid more taxes in the India and the Philippines than in the US.

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

Mr. Trump’s U.S. payment, after factoring in his losses, was roughly equivalent, in dollars not adjusted for inflation, to another presidential tax bill revealed nearly a half-century before. In 1973, The Providence Journal reported that, after a charitable deduction for donating his presidential papers, Richard M. Nixon had paid $792.81 in 1970 on income of about $200,000.

The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.

It looks like the office of the presidency has become central to creating and maintaining the revenue streams Trump will need to stay solvent from this point on.

[GMDino]

DJT is, of course, saying this is "fake news" and that he has LOTS of money and income.  Which I am sure the IRS will find very interesting.

[BmorePat87]

[Dill]

(09-28-2020, 02:16 PM)GMDino Wrote: DJT is, of course, saying this is "fake news" and that he has LOTS of money and income.  Which I am sure the IRS will find very interesting.

MSNBC's MTP Daily interviewed some Trump supporters about this "hoax." 

One doubts the entire report because of the source, and another says she is paying less in taxes, 

so as far as she is concerned "This presidency works for me."

[jj22]

We've found the welfare Queen.

He's a con. But we've long knew that. Well most of us.

[BmorePat87]

So some takeaways got buried under the headline of how much he pays in taxes.

He has been writing off consulting fees to pay less in taxes, including giving $750k to Ivanka’s consulting company even as she was a VP for his company.

He writes off a wealth of family personal expenses as business expenses.

A great portion of his income is coming from overseas investments

He was in such dire financial straits that the logical assumption is the campaign was just an attempt to rebrand himself for his next money making venture

He blew through his apprentice money with poor investments, particularly golf courses, that are hemorrhaging money

The most successful aspect of his business is selling his likeness

[Dill]

(09-28-2020, 02:24 PM)jj22 Wrote: We've found the welfare Queen.

He's a con. But we've long knew that. Well most of us.

LOL Whattabout the Clintons?!?

Clintons were worse than Trump but disguised their "Clinton Foundation" con from voters by transparent accounting,

not breaking the law, and actually providing millions of dollars of needed drugs to developing countries.



I hope some of these sharp reporters are mapping the relation between Trump's tax breaks and his personal tax liability.

[jj22]

Trump can prove all this "fake news" by releasing the Tax returns. I mean wouldn't we all if it would exonerate us?

But even if he won't, a 10+ year audit (longest audit in IRS history) sounds like trouble in the making that is leading to prison for tax invasion eventually. His excuse for not releasing them is an admission of guilt/trouble, and should be noted.

[Dill]

(09-28-2020, 02:32 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: The most successful aspect of his business is selling his likeness

For that to work, people have to believe he is a billionaire deal maker.

I believe few Trump supporters in the US will take Trump's word on the "hoax" over the NYT, 

but am thinking that overseas, this "brand" may be becoming less and less attractive--crimping his most important revenue source.

[GMDino]

(09-28-2020, 02:32 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: So some takeaways got buried under the headline of how much he pays in taxes.

He has been writing off consulting fees to pay less in taxes, including giving $750k to Ivanka’s consulting company even as she was a VP for his company.

He writes off a wealth of family personal expenses as business expenses.

A great portion of his income is coming from overseas investments

He was in such dire financial straits that the logical assumption is the campaign was just an attempt to rebrand himself for his next money making venture

He blew through his apprentice money with poor investments, particularly golf courses, that are hemorrhaging money

The most successful aspect of his business is selling his likeness

The Ivanka stuff is interesting.  Everything I read said it is illegal.  Not shady.  Not smart/clever accounting.  Illegal.  So there's that.

And 70,000 on his hair.

[Goalpost]

I could be wrong but I thought Haiti was a joke with the Clintons on the earthquake relief. Didn't Clinton's brother scarf on a mining operation there also?

[Belsnickel]

(09-28-2020, 02:41 PM)Goalpost Wrote: I could be wrong but I thought Haiti was a joke with the Clintons on the earthquake relief. Didn't Clinton's brother scarf on a mining operation there also?

Hi. You can take your attempt to deflect the thread with whataboutism elsewhere. If you can't defend Trump without bringing up someone else irrelevant to the conversation, then you don't have anything worthwhile to add.

[Dill]

(09-28-2020, 02:50 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Hi. You can take your attempt to deflect the thread with whataboutism elsewhere. If you can't defend Trump without bringing up someone else irrelevant to the conversation, then you don't have anything worthwhile to add.

Oops, he may be responding to my fake whattaboutism in post #10.

I'm still astounded at the fuss made over Clinton "corruption" and the silence over what has to be the most blatantly and unapologetically corrupt presidential administration in history.

[Belsnickel]

(09-28-2020, 02:54 PM)Dill Wrote: Oops, he may be responding to my fake whattaboutism.

Honestly, I didn't even see that one. My apologies.

[Goalpost]

(09-28-2020, 02:50 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Hi. You can take your attempt to deflect the thread with whataboutism elsewhere. If you can't defend Trump without bringing up someone else irrelevant to the conversation, then you don't have anything worthwhile to add.

Hi,  Clinton's name was mentioned in the thread before mine.

[Belsnickel]

(09-28-2020, 02:56 PM)Goalpost Wrote: Hi,  Clinton's name was mentioned in the thread before mine.

Indeed it was. In a sarcastic manner mocking the types of people that would jump to the defense of Trump in this scenario by bringing up the Clintons.

[Dill]

(09-28-2020, 02:41 PM)Goalpost Wrote: I could be wrong but I thought Haiti was a joke with the Clintons on the earthquake relief.  Didn't Clinton's brother scarf on a mining operation there also?

Haiti may be the one black mark on Bill Clinton's record of aid and good works, but not because he used the earthquake as a scheme to get rich.

He was in charge of the international organization which pledged to bring in money for reconstruction and align it with the Haitian's government's development goals.

As I understand it, the big problem was Clinton did not work hard enough--or at east effectively enough--to get a group of international banks to give the billions in aid they pledged.  

So it not like a mass of money disappeared via Clinton channels, but that it never appeared in Haiti--still hasn't 10 years after the quake.

Here is a source I find trustworthy on the subject. 
https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/bill-clinton-once-enjoyed-bright-legacy-haiti-then-2010-earthquake-struck

[samhain]

I wonder if Parscale drank himself into a stupor and threatened to off himself randomly or if it was tied to possible knowledge of the release of this info. Think he may have concerns over possible consequences to catching federal charges?

[fredtoast]

It makes no difference to his base.

They don't care how much he lies or how crooked he is.

They don't care that the only way he knew how to pump up the economy was through massive increases in deficit spending.

All they care is that he is not a democrat.