Today, The Briefing released the following after it was revealed Donald Trump may not have paid taxes for eighteen years.
No time to read? Get the toplines here:
- Over the weekend, The New York Times published quite the story: Donald Trump, self-proclaimed tremendous businessman, lost $916 million (!) in a single year.
- That would have allowed him to take advantage of a loophole in our tax system — and potentially weasel out of paying federal income taxes for 18 years.
- But he still won’t release the rest of his tax returns. So who’s to say what else he’s hiding.
- Check out our Trump “Smart” Tax Calculator, to see how much you’d pay in taxes if you paid at the same rate as Trump.
- Read The New York Times’ original story here.
This weekend, we got the clearest example yet why Donald Trump has been so reluctant to release his tax returns.
Here’s the full story: A couple weeks ago, an anonymous source mailed The New York Times parts of Trump’s 1995 tax returns. The Paper of Record investigated further and published a piece on Saturday night detailing how the GOP’s presidential candidate could have taken advantage of our broken, billionaire-friendly tax system to avoid paying his fair share.
This gets complicated, so let’s go through it point by point:
- It all started with Trump — the man with the “very good brain” — losing nearly a billion dollars in 1995 after making a series of really, really bad investments.
- But while those terrible business decisions no doubt led to workers getting laid off and small businesses getting stiffed, Trump himself stood to benefit from losing all those millions.
- Our tax code would have allowed him subtract any business-related loss from his own personal taxes.
- And because he lost so much money in 1995, he may have skirted paying any federal income tax for nearly two decades.
- So while the rest of us were chipping in to help fund our military and our public education system, Donald Trump probably weaseled out of paying a single cent.
We got all of this from just three pages of documents. Imagine what the rest of his tax returns would reveal — what other sketchy business practices he’s embraced and what other murky ethical decisions he’s made.
We can only hope that this new report will lead to more facts coming to light in the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, we put together a Trump “Smart” Tax Calculator, so you can see how much you’d pay in taxes if you paid at the same rate as Trump. (Hint: It’s almost certainly less than what you pay right now.)
With just 36 days to go, we need your help to guarantee that this failed businessman never gets to run the largest national economy in the world. Share this calculator with your friends and make sure they know the truth about Trump’s business “success”.
For all the latest, follow our Scheduled Events page and follow Clinton on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. Also, be sure to subscribe to the campaign’s official Podcast, With Her.
Hillary Clinton Speeches 