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| Topic | Donald Trump paid only $750 in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017. |
| billcom6 09/27/20 5:27:36 PM #10: | The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the presidents business empire. They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-billionaire image honed through his star turn on The Apprentice that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the loyalty of many in his base. Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life. 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 Timess 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. Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name. As the legal and political battles over access to his tax returns have intensified, Mr. Trump has often wondered aloud why anyone would even want to see them. Theres nothing to learn from them, he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe. In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example, Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9 million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom line: $47.4 million in losses. Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every business expense Mr. Trump claims to reduce his taxable income for instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability to get by without paying taxes makes me smart, as he said in 2016. But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out. --- //constant loneliness// --- Steam and Fortnite: billcom6 My Teams: The Ohio State Buckeyes, New York Yankees, Buffalo Bills, The CBJ, Cavs ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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