NYT Publishes 10,000 Word Summary Of 20 Years Of Trump Tax Returns; President Calls It “Totally Fake News” | Zero Hedge
With the news and outrage cycle in need of a fresh Trump reset now that the first presidential debate is just two days away, on Sunday afternoon – almost exactly two years after the NYT first published a report alleging how Trump “engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father“, the NYT published what to many anti-Trumpers is the holy grail of Trump bomshells: a 10,000+ word summary of more than two decades of Trump tax documents which reveal that the president paid no income taxes for 10 of the 15 years before he was elected president, with his income tax payments in 2016 and 2017 amounting to just $750. The reason, as was already largely known, Trump had generated nearly $1 billion in casino-linked losses in the 1990s and onward (incidentally, loss carryfowards or NOLs are perfectly acceptable and legal instrument which anyone can apply against future income) and which offset much of the money that he made.
The NYT also claims the documents show Trump losing millions of dollars from his golf courses, “vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due” and that Trump earned $73 million abroad.
Combined, Trump initially paid almost $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years. He later managed to recoup most of that money, with interest, by applying for and receiving a $72.9 million tax refund, starting in 2010.
“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.
With the news and outrage cycle in need of a fresh Trump reset now that the first presidential debate is just two days away, on Sunday afternoon – almost exactly two years after the NYT first published a report alleging how Trump “engaged in suspect tax schemes as he reaped riches from his father“, the NYT published what to many anti-Trumpers is the holy grail of Trump bomshells: a 10,000+ word summary of more than two decades of Trump tax documents which reveal that the president paid no income taxes for 10 of the 15 years before he was elected president, with his income tax payments in 2016 and 2017 amounting to just $750. The reason, as was already largely known, Trump had generated nearly $1 billion in casino-linked losses in the 1990s and onward (incidentally, loss carryfowards or NOLs are perfectly acceptable and legal instrument which anyone can apply against future income) and which offset much of the money that he made.
The NYT also claims the documents show Trump losing millions of dollars from his golf courses, “vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due” and that Trump earned $73 million abroad.
Combined, Trump initially paid almost $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years. He later managed to recoup most of that money, with interest, by applying for and receiving a $72.9 million tax refund, starting in 2010.
“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.
The NYT report focuses closely on the specifics of the $73 million refund:
A large refund has been crucial to his tax avoidance.
Mr. Trump did face large tax bills after the initial success of “The Apprentice” television show, but he erased most of these tax payments through a refund. Combined, Mr. Trump initially paid almost $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years. He later managed to recoup most of that money, with interest, by applying for and receiving a $72.9 million tax refund, starting in 2010. The refund reduced his total federal income tax bill between 2000 and 2017 to an annual average of $1.4 million. By comparison, the average American in the top .001 percent of earners paid about $25 million in federal income taxes each year over the same span.
The $72.9 million refund has since become the subject of a long-running battle with the I.R.S.
When applying for the refund, he cited a giant financial loss that may be related to the failure of his Atlantic City casinos. Publicly, he also claimed that he had fully surrendered his stake in the casinos. But the real story may be different from the one he told. Federal law holds that investors can claim a total loss on an investment, as Mr. Trump did, only if they receive nothing in return. Mr. Trump did appear to receive something in return: 5 percent of the new casino company that formed when he renounced his stake. In 2011, the I.R.S. began an audit reviewing the legitimacy of the refund. Almost a decade later, the case remains unresolved, for unknown reasons, and could ultimately end up in federal court, where it could become a matter of public record.