This just went up online… Here’s the link:
In short, Trump declared a loss of about $916 million on his 1995 taxes. That loss would be, the Times says, “large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.
The $916 million loss certainly could have eliminated any federal income taxes Mr. Trump otherwise would have owed on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of “The Apprentice,” or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company he created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar.
The article continues that the Trump campaign did not “challenge or confirm” the amounts in the returns. The Times did also receive a letter from a lawyer (big shock) threatening to sue if they published the documents. These numbers aren’t from a Federal return but from New York State and New Jersey tax forms, and they arrived mysteriously via mail at the Times’ offices here in New York City.
That he seemingly paid no tax isn’t illegal. As the article says:
But the most important revelation from the 1995 tax documents is just how much Mr. Trump may have benefited from a tax provision that is particularly prized by America’s dynastic families, who, like the Trumps, hold their wealth inside byzantine networks of partnerships, limited-liability companies and S corporations.
The provision, known as “net operating loss,” or “N.O.L.,” allows a dizzying array of deductions, business expenses, real estate depreciation, losses from the sale of business assets and even operating losses to flow from the balance sheets of those partnerships, limited liability companies and S corporations onto the personal tax returns of men like Mr. Trump. In turn, those losses can then be used to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income from, say, book royalties or branding deals.
This is all optics. Just like when Mitt Romney revealed that his Federal tax rate was only 14% on a $20 million income. Nothing illegal there, but it just looks miserable.
May these three pages of tax returns the New York Times have be the final anchor around the great orange lunatic’s neck these last six weeks.