signalmankenneth
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I don't believe Trump is even a billionaire?!!
Former President Donald Trump loses vast amounts of money. Yet he lives a gilded lifestyle and never runs short of the cash needed to pay lawyers perpetually defending him against charges large and small. How does he do it?
We’re gradually finding out, now that Congress has obtained six years’ of Trump’s tax returns from the IRS. Democrats investigating Trump’s finances haven’t yet released the full returns, but they’ve published two reports that provide an overview of Trump’s income and reveal how he keeps his tax bill remarkably low. Ordinary taxpayers might feel infuriated. Or envious.
From 2015 through 2020, Trump declared a positive income in two years and a negative income in four years. His losses heavily outweigh his gains. For the six years in total, Trump reported $52.6 million in negative income, or, in other words, $52.6 million in losses.
A typical worker can’t live on negative income. Yet Trump manages to do so. That’s because he uses business losses to offset real income and reduce the amount of taxes he owes. To a large extent, this is legal, given multiple provisions of the tax code that provide relief for business owners, and especially for real-estate developers such as Trump. The details of Trump’s complete tax returns will go a lot further toward explaining whether he cheats.
There’s considerable evidence that he does cheat. “Trump avoids paying taxes by creating a lot of losses, both real and fake,” tax lawyer Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center said. “From a tax standpoint he’s often underwater, but that’s an artifact of the tax system and not so much real.” Rosenthal calls Trump’s financial statements “tax-aggressive.”
Two New York Times exposés, based on 20 years of Trump’s financial data leaked by his niece Mary Trump, detailed many possible instances of tax fraud. The New York State attorney general is suing Trump for a variety of “dubious tax schemes … including instances of outright fraud.” One practice under scrutiny is valuing properties sharply lower in tax filings than in other business documents. Tax experts studying the two Congressional reports point out several red flags suggesting fraud, including undocumented charitable donations and payments to family members that might actually be gifts.
Trump has repeatedly derided probes of his finances as politically motivated “witch hunts,” and described himself as “smart” for using tax breaks to boost his take-home pay. Yet he never released his tax returns, even though he pledged to do so many times. The Internal Revenue Service is supposed to audit the tax returns of every president, but it never finished an audit of Trump while he was president. There’s evidence Trump or his advisers pressured the IRS to back off.
Trump does earn substantial amounts of money, though the exact sources of his income aren’t defined in the two Congressional overview reports. From 2015 through 2020, for instance, Trump earned $59 million in interest and dividend payments, ranging from a low of $6.8 million in 2017 to a high of $11.4 million in 2019. Most of that income is from interest payments, though it’s not clear if that is simple interest on financial assets or something more complex.
From 2015 through 2019, Trump earned $86 million in capital gains. The source of these gains isn’t clear, but it’s well known that Trump makes a lot of money by licensing his name for use on commercial properties and other types of products. There’s no capital gain listed for 2020, for reasons unknown
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/donald-trump-is-americas-poorest-billionaire-203449223.html
Former President Donald Trump loses vast amounts of money. Yet he lives a gilded lifestyle and never runs short of the cash needed to pay lawyers perpetually defending him against charges large and small. How does he do it?
We’re gradually finding out, now that Congress has obtained six years’ of Trump’s tax returns from the IRS. Democrats investigating Trump’s finances haven’t yet released the full returns, but they’ve published two reports that provide an overview of Trump’s income and reveal how he keeps his tax bill remarkably low. Ordinary taxpayers might feel infuriated. Or envious.
From 2015 through 2020, Trump declared a positive income in two years and a negative income in four years. His losses heavily outweigh his gains. For the six years in total, Trump reported $52.6 million in negative income, or, in other words, $52.6 million in losses.
A typical worker can’t live on negative income. Yet Trump manages to do so. That’s because he uses business losses to offset real income and reduce the amount of taxes he owes. To a large extent, this is legal, given multiple provisions of the tax code that provide relief for business owners, and especially for real-estate developers such as Trump. The details of Trump’s complete tax returns will go a lot further toward explaining whether he cheats.
There’s considerable evidence that he does cheat. “Trump avoids paying taxes by creating a lot of losses, both real and fake,” tax lawyer Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center said. “From a tax standpoint he’s often underwater, but that’s an artifact of the tax system and not so much real.” Rosenthal calls Trump’s financial statements “tax-aggressive.”
Two New York Times exposés, based on 20 years of Trump’s financial data leaked by his niece Mary Trump, detailed many possible instances of tax fraud. The New York State attorney general is suing Trump for a variety of “dubious tax schemes … including instances of outright fraud.” One practice under scrutiny is valuing properties sharply lower in tax filings than in other business documents. Tax experts studying the two Congressional reports point out several red flags suggesting fraud, including undocumented charitable donations and payments to family members that might actually be gifts.
Trump has repeatedly derided probes of his finances as politically motivated “witch hunts,” and described himself as “smart” for using tax breaks to boost his take-home pay. Yet he never released his tax returns, even though he pledged to do so many times. The Internal Revenue Service is supposed to audit the tax returns of every president, but it never finished an audit of Trump while he was president. There’s evidence Trump or his advisers pressured the IRS to back off.
Trump does earn substantial amounts of money, though the exact sources of his income aren’t defined in the two Congressional overview reports. From 2015 through 2020, for instance, Trump earned $59 million in interest and dividend payments, ranging from a low of $6.8 million in 2017 to a high of $11.4 million in 2019. Most of that income is from interest payments, though it’s not clear if that is simple interest on financial assets or something more complex.
From 2015 through 2019, Trump earned $86 million in capital gains. The source of these gains isn’t clear, but it’s well known that Trump makes a lot of money by licensing his name for use on commercial properties and other types of products. There’s no capital gain listed for 2020, for reasons unknown
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/donald-trump-is-americas-poorest-billionaire-203449223.html
