Am I the only one that doesn't care that Trump didn't pay anything in taxes
Seriously, the bigger issue here is that he is a fucking idiot that doesn't know how to make money honestly. If you don't know how to make money, I don't expect you to pay taxes.
This is a man that has only ever had a successful business if it was built on fraud, manipulation, or squelching on debts. He has driven everything his father built into the ground, and has failed at everything he has ever tried. I mean Jesus, he lost the popular vote to HILLARY FUCKING CLINTON. How on earth can anyone be less popular than Hillary Clinton?
He is letting Putin put bounties on US soldiers, he has let hundreds of thousands of American's die in the worst COVID recovery in the developed world, he's called American patriots "losers for getting caught", he's lost working class American's jobs, his own staff have to treat him like a 5 year old.
The fact that the taxes thing is getting so much traction in the past few weeks is mind blowing, he's a fucking loser, of course he doesn't pay taxes.
I’m in nooooo way a Trump supporter. I’m voting for Biden. However, I don’t understand the obssession with his taxes. I plan on voting Biden however I am a believer in tax cuts. I think the federal govt already collects enough revenue. They just waste most of it & then end up needing to tax more. If they do want to need to raise taxes to raise more money then I believe it should only be on large corporations(Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla, etc.). But in all, Trump’s taxes are of no importance to me. Everyone would pay less taxes if they could get away with it.
Agree with the gist of this. Our legal and tax system allow for certain write offs, carry forwards, etc. He, and everyone else, is within his rights to use whatever legal manuevers to reduce his tax liabilities. He'd be foolish not to. Quite frankly, I'd be more concerned about the savvy of an individual if they ignored these opportunities less tax. It's called tax avoidance, not tax evasion. One is prudent, the other illegal.
I'm all for the wealthy leveraging the tax code. Hopefully, and many do / are, they invest their savings in opportunities that create value (jobs, access to capital, etc.) for others or are benevolent and help worthy causes.
For Trumpy, it's more of an optics thing as the left likes to pit wealth against the working class.
He's in a dispute with the IRS over fraud, so this isn't about finding loopholes.
Agree that people should use whatever legal maneuvers available to reduce their tax bill.
However, the legality of some of Trump’s write-offs (i.e. paying his daughter millions in consulting fees so they are considered a business expense rather than a gift) is questionable.
The federal government could probably be missing more in tax receipts from large corporations like the ones you listed, exchange Tesla for Apple though. These companies have utilized favorable international tax laws in Ireland and the Netherlands that allow these companies to pay little or no taxes for any products of theirs because they are claiming royalties elsewhere. They've been doing it for years now. Ireland is now considered like a second Silicon Valley because of how big tech has grown in those countries. This tax loophole is legal yet the tax revenue is going to no one. It's been brought up in European courts for many years now with many figures cited in the billions. However, these tech giants continually win because they've already grown to be major monopolies with the right lawyers and refusal of Ireland and the Netherlands to raise tax rates. Additionally, we saw earlier this summer Congress waking up a bit more with the anti-trust hearing. These tech CEOs were good at playing dumb is all I can say. There needs to be a better way to hold these large corporations accountable for morale and actually figure out how to close the corporate tax loophole.
Taxes are a roadmap to understanding his dealings. I don’t care if he paid taxes but I do care if he has committed tax and bank fraud, and I definitely care if he owes money to foreign powers. The fact that he paid hundreds of dthousands of dollars in taxes to foreign governments and zero to the USA is indicative of the extent of his foreign entanglements. To put another way, there is a forensic accounting issue involved here.
“ButTTtt i pAiiiDDddd mOoooRRrEee aSss a MinnnNnimuMm waAaage WoorkEER”
Long story short, it’s a big nothing burger that the left jumped on because it’s an easy media talking point that the masses will remember. People in this country are honestly too stupid to understand how this can happen and simply think because Chris Cuomo said, that the big orange man somehow stole from the government. It’s ridiculous. But be careful saying that stuff around here..... the woke crowd has officially invaded WSO and this place is turning into a shell of its former self. It is practically Reddit nowadays.
There is nothing woke about disliking fraud.
Having a tax lawyer find every loophole passed through the house = Fraud
If you think trump does his own taxes you are a complete and utter fool.
I'm sorry what's "woke" about complaining about someone paying less taxes than most people?
People went bananas when they realized Mitt Romney paid only 14% in tax. And those people weren't the "woke". They were average American people who hated Romney's elitist image.
Also if you think it's just the "woke" crowd that turned WSO into reddit, you're just wrong. I've noticed plenty of smooth brained Trump apologists and bigots on WSO going "DeMs sOciAliStZ muh. SoCiALisTZ bAd. GLOBALIZATION BaD." You don't have to be an idiot to be a Trump supporter yet the loudest ones are.
Plain and simple.
You don't get to pay your family members in "consulting fees" and then use it as a tax write-off. That's fraud, he should go to prison
ridiculous argument. Family member has nothing to do with it. Simple tax accounting. Consulting fee is a write off to the payor and taxable income to the payee. Who cares if it's a family member? She gets a salary. She also gets a consulting fee likely paid to some LLC which has its own write offs. So many ways to legally do this. Benefit to the fee vs wage is limiting payroll tax (16% savings and smart).
It is hard to tell exactly what happened here but it looks like double dipping
I am not a tax advisor but that doesn’t sound logical. If it was so simple then every family owned company in the country would pay zero in taxes because they would simply pay relatives consulting fees in order to zero out earnings and pay no taxes.
The consulting fees look like fraud but may be not for the reason you mentioned. Trump took a write off for the consulting fees but apparently Ivanka had already been paid to manage hotels which was part of her job. It would seem as though he is double counting the consulting fees, which would be fraud.
My concerns are not such much the lack of income tax payments, but moreso things such as a) his supporters prop him up as a excellent businessman, when really all his money seems to come from a mix of inheritance, The Apprentice (a REALITY TV SHOW), and passive investments in which he is a minority/non-controlling member (his active/controlling investments are all bleeding cash), and b) there are huge conflicts of interest i.e. he has huge investments in leveraged, struggling hotels and resorts which likely influenced his decision to downplay the virus and keep the economy open as much as possible.
Also, as far as the loopholes, okay, a lot of rich people use them, and I personally know a handful of ultra high net worth 0.1%ers that take advantage of RE depreciation to significantly reduce their taxes to well below a "fair" amount, but you can't deny that taking write-offs for paying his daughter "consulting fees" or $70k of hairstyling expenses (lol) is extremely fishy at best.
Sure, agree with you in a lot of regards... I also think that any educated person who supports trump does not think he is some great businessman.
He is an opportunist who was born into the right family at the right time. Has a interest in real estate and used the connections to get him going. He is a great entertainer and knows how to capitalize on that.... beyond that I think the guy is nothing more than a talking head. He doesn’t come up with policy and it would be silly to think he does.
EXACTLY. He has basically ruined everything he touched. How do you lose money in gambling?!
It is hard to lose money in an industry in which the house always wins.
Ha sad to see this comment on this forum. Usually you see something like this on Reddit or Twitter.
Do you think casinos have some limitless value, or are some risk free investment or something?
Not that trump is some amazing businessman, but casino industry is hospitality real estate, it is absolutely a risky investment.
You mentioned the hairstylist and the consulting fees, but not the $70 MM refund which is central to the dispute of the IRS audit. It appears he committed fraud in misrepresenting himself in order to obtain that refund.
It's crazy to me how easy it is to win WSO over. You'd think wealth building was at the forefront of this board's mind. But nope. It's simply taxes, or the lack thereof. Pretty impressive the stark contradiction.
Wealth building is at the forefront of this forum.
Most people on this forum are young adults with high wages in large cities, probably the most heavily taxed demographic in the country. That tax burden hinders the ability to invest more meaningful sums and slows down the building of real wealth.
When people like Trump use possibly illegal tactics to reduce their own tax bill over a long period of time, the government makes up the difference by taxing upper middle class wage earners more and more. So if anything, the people on this forum represent the demographic that should be the most pissed off about the circumstances.
This is exactly my point. Not only does the government tax more from the rest of us now, but it also leads to more future taxation because of the government's debt burden. The impact to the dollar worsens our growth prospects. You could even talk about the deterioration to our communities providing less and less value overtime, due to the government's inability to support services. There are a ton of consequences to this stuff, but the point is, Trump simply benefitting to the extreme extent that he is, is not as open and shut of a situation as much as "lower taxes bro".
I care that he did not pay taxes because it means that other people have to pay more in taxes.
This is false, the government isn't funded off of tax payer money, it can basically set the monetary supply wherever it wants. Middle / lower class tax rates will probably never rise as they are to politically charged. All it means is the govt has to raise additional debt to fund the difference.
What do you think the US government does with our tax payments? The US government can raise money in one of two ways: collecting taxes and issuing debt.
It's all political. There are many other issues to worry about with Trump or anything else going on in the world. It was conveniently leaked right before the first debate. Outside of politics I don't know why anybody would give a shit.
Didn't read don't care
I agree that the “only $750 in taxes” thing is not important enough to be the main focus. I would think things like him writing off personal legal fees as business expense would be a bigger deal considering it is blatant fraud.
This is simplistic. “Trump doesn’t pay any taxes” is absolutely incorrect. He paid very little federal personal income tax for some period.
I guarantee, with him having so many operations in NY, he pays a shit ton of other taxes through his organization. Also, using depreciation and other tools to efficiently manage your taxes so you have little cash out the door is what all the big boys and girls do. Companies are the same. You may take aggressive tax positions that dont pass an audit, but as long as you have a theoretical footing its not something you go to jail for.
Let’s also not forget that tRumps own attorney testified under oath that tRump regularly inflated and deflated the value of his properties at Will, to suit his purposes. This lent itself to tax and insurance fraud. It has been confirmed by investigative reporting that isn’t he same year the value of tRumps properties would swing wildly, depending on the audience.
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The fact that even on an allegedly finance forum people can't/don't want to understand how this can happen is all you need to know about this so called class of ''qualified'', that is so emotionally involved to be unable to apply their expertise to basic queries.
Even more telling that these people will believe anything without question, no matter when the same sources have been exposed as biased, dishonest or outright liars. Half of the things OP said aren't even true, but it doesn't matter. He's blinded by envy and hatred and he will believe anything that justifies those feelings. Nobody even questions whether the NYT is telling the truth, when in their own article they admit everything they said isn't totally correct ''to protect sources''. K.
The more I see this crap, the more I see people whose university degree confers them nothing more than a confirmation of their prejudice mixed with unshakable arrogance. Baizuo IYIs.
Op here. Glad you didn't read my original post at all, didn't at all dispute his treatment of taxes-- have no problem with them at all. I'll copy and paste sources for each and every claim below. Doesn't really matter to me if a claim is "biased" or not, as long as it is factual (which they all are). That being said most of what I've copied is from the WSJ, and others from places like the brookings institute-- so hard to argue the biased point.
I don't know how you can accuse me of being envious of someone that is broke, fat, and has a mushroom dick (happy to post source for that too). I'm firmly indpt. and really doubt you've actually had an open mind about any of this. I think you accusing the NYT-- one of the oldest and most respected journalism sources in the world, of purposefully making up facts-- something that would literally cost them tens of millions of dollars in litigation, on something that they could be proved wrong about SO easily. Seriously, are you that blinded by your love for him that you think that's the truth? Doesn't that seems just a little bit far fetched to you? Doesn't it seem a little bit more likely that he is just a massive fucking failure? Use your brain and read a little.
The above is only seriously the bare minimum you can claim about him. But as promised sources for every claim above, in no particular order:
1. He has driven everything his father built into the ground
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump…
2. He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election
3. Letting putin put bounties of US soldiers
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/07/27/president-trump-russian-…
4. "has only ever had a successful business if it was built on fraud, manipulation, or squelching on debts."
is basically pattern recognition from repeated behaviors, all his claimed "massive successes" are generally giant losses for him/his family See here, here, and here (again)), he has engaged, repeatedly in fraud (see here, here, and here), and is well known to not pay contractors and/or banks (see here, here, here, and here). It's been pretty well reported that he made a ton of money off The Apprentice, and the numbers in my mind tie pretty well to the fact that he has since then lost most of it in other trump business affairs
5. he has let hundreds of thousands of American's die in the worst COVID recovery in the developed world
Here, here, and here
6. he's called American patriots "losers for getting caught"
Here
7. he's lost working class American's jobs
Here
8. his own staff have to treat him like a 5 year old.
Here
In your entire post, you used twice WSJ and that's the only quality source.The rest is overwhelmingly NYT, with some sparkling of CNN, VOX, Guardian, Motherjones and wikipedia (LOL), aka sources with a long history of lies and bias on this specific topic.
You also repeat disproven smearjobs. Pass. You proved exactly the point I was making.
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