Reasons # 44: Tax avoidance
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
Every year Pat and I sit down with our accountant and after a rapid series of taps on the calculator, she looks me in the eye and reads out two dollar amounts, one owed to the feds and one for the state of California. I suppose that I grimace and perhaps groan when the totals are read out, but I quickly recover and sign the returns and checks. It hurts, but as a citizen, it is my duty to pay my fare share to maintain our government: the air force base a short distance away, the federal highways I travel on, the bureaucracies that manage my social security and Medicare accounts, the CDC that helped protect me from COVID and on and on and on. I am not in the military; there is no way for me to express my patriotism other than singing the national anthem and paying my damn taxes.
How can servicemen vote for a man who does not pay his fair share to support the military?
Now I earned a comfortable living, working as a thoracic surgeon, but never built a fortune anything like Donald Trump, who many times has bragged that he is a multi-billionaire. So, he must pay a lot more taxes than you and I, right? Au contraire, for many years he paid none at all. How is that possible, particularly since he espouses an ostentatious MAGA patriotism. Trump claims that he is a brilliant businessman, but also has claimed billions of dollars of business losses that serve as offsets allowing him to pay no taxes for fifteen years!
And that is just taxes on personal income. He also routinely tries to shake down local governments to give him corporate tax breaks for his construction projects. This started in 1973, when the mayor of New York city provided a 99-year tax abatement for the renovation of the Commadore Hotel. The total cost to the city from this agreement is estimated to exceed $300 million! And yet Republicans characterize single mothers who receive government subsidies as “welfare queens”.
Then there is the problem of financial reports. Taxes are based upon how much you earn. Trump routinely inflates his assets for financial magazine most wealthy lists and loan applications, but these same figures shrink markedly where tax considerations appear. He has recently been found guilty of thirty-four felonies for making false financial assertions on official documents.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-charges-conviction-guilty-verdict/
Although past presidents have routinely disclosed their tax returns to the public, before election day, Donald Trump broke ranks, claiming that he was not allowed to do so while under audit. This of course is a fabrication. One of thousands. David Cay Johnston, who probably knows more about Trumps finances than anyone else, has written (The Big Cheat: How that Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family) that Donald paid zero federal taxes for fifteen years and less than $750 in two other years. Please look back at your own tax returns over a seventeen-year period and ask yourself if it is fair that a billionaire paid far less taxes than you. To make things far worse, Trump virtually spits in the eyes of taxpayers when he brags that “not paying taxes makes me smart”.
Johnston also explains in detail how Trump games the alternate minimum tax, paying $31 million in 2005 and getting it back in a $73 million rebate in 2010. Have you even gotten a penny back from your alternate minimum tax? I certainly have not. Does that make us stupid? BTW, Jared and Ivanka earned $1.7 million and paid no taxes in 2015. Go figure.
The Trump Organization has been convicted of fraudulently not paying taxes on benefits provided to executives.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/donald-trump-company-tax-evasion-fraud/672383/
When the House Ways and Means Committee and federal judges finally compelled Trump to release tax returns, numerous interesting items emerged. For example, although Trump promised that he would donate his entire presidential salary to charity, there is no claim for such a donation in 2020. Do you think he forgot to claim the charitable deduction?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/30/politics/donald-trump-tax-returns-released/index.html
Let’s finish up today by looking back to try to understand why Trump paid no taxes for fifteen years. NPR reported that he claimed $916 million in losses from his casino businesses. This despite the fact that he was paying himself $ 2 million in salary and claims he made $44 million personally from his casino adventures. At one point in time, he owed $3.4 billion.
These enormous losses allowed him to offset what he otherwise would have paid in taxes over fifteen years.
https://www.npr.org/2016/10/04/496596466/how-donald-trump-lost-916-million
Let’s put that in perspective. Trump never paid almost a billion dollars he owed in taxes because he made a number of reckless and stupid business decisions. Why do we taxpayers have to clean up his sloppy mess? Trump’s tax avoidance has one of two possible consequences, either it is part of our national debt, or the money was paid by other honest shmoes like you and me. Doesn’t that piss you off, even a little?
Just one final observation. Right-wingers routinely taunt democrats following intemperate remarks about “Defunding the Police”. Well, the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, are the financial police and guess who defunded them?
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
Please don’t vote for a man who pays less taxes than his own employees or than you or me.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
September 1, 2024