Topic: Trump Tax Avoidance: Shrewd Smart Businessman or Deserves Jail Time? - page 2. (Read 292 times)

Avoidance is morally dubious but legal.
Evasion is morally dubious and illegal.

They're both wrong, really. It's just that one of the wrongs is permitted. I'd say we need to examine the idea that performing immoral but legal actions should be lauded. This idea is a part of what puts people like Trump in power. Morality is of course subjective, but I am using it in the sense of obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.

Even to claim that a carry-forward of losses is a "loophole" is ridiculous. So everyone that's in a business now with Covid, they are almost all showing losses for 2020.

And it's a "moral question" as to their using a "loophole" and carry forwarding those losses?

Really?

Better question than this two would be: Does a businessman making $1.17 billion in loss deserve to run biggest economy? What loss he will make to that economy?

Huh? What are you talking about?

A businessman hires a tax accountant. He reads the tax code and applies it to the circumstances of the business, and files papers and pays tax accordingly.

That was done here. Where's your beef?

I mean -- you did note the part that he had losses that were so large up to that point that it was being carried forward to offset income in further years. So is that really something we have to sit here and debate about? He lost money at some point and the tax code said that he could carry that loss forward to offset income.

Nothing wrong with that. Even if the 'loophole' was closed in later years (this is what I had read at somepoint, not sure on the source) Nothing was actually illegal here, right?

Every business man is doing the same, so there is nothing to be blamed when a successful business man became the president.I see this as a real skill and can bring revenue to the government, see what happened with tiktok they bullied and bought the company.

All USA Federal income tax (IRS income tax) is based on voluntary agreement with the IRS. When a person fills out an IRS form like IRS Form W-4, he states (though not directly and formally) that he is accepting the IRS as his taxing authority. This is where the IRS gets their authority from... the people who fill out the IRS forms. In Trump's case, he probably signed many IRS forms that indicate that he is accepting the IRS as his taxing authority.

In the case of the average working class person, if the person does NOT sign any forms that say/suggest that the IRS is his taxing authority, he doesn't owe taxes. If he fills out the IRS Form W-4 for/with his employer,
and on every line places "n-a,"
and writes across the form "EXEMPT,"
and signs it "non-assumpsit (no contract), his signature,"
his employer is required to NOT withhold,
and the IRS is required to not tax him.

The problem is that because most people have volunteered to pay, employers may not listen to the form, and IRS people will often make trouble for people. They simply don't know the law, just like the rest of the people.

That is the start of a letter-writing campaign by the employee, instructing the employer and the IRS to not withhold or tax. Depending on the ferocity of the attack against the employee, the letters might go on for 2 or 3 months, but they could go on for a lot shorter of a time period. Following that, the employee will need to take his employer and/or the IRS agent(s) in question to court seeking damages.

I am not going to go into detail regarding what to write in the letters, or how to take them to court, in this post. You can find the information, if you are serious, here - https://www.youtube.com/c/CraigLynch/videos.

In the case of Trump, if he is guilty of not paying the appropriate amount of income taxes, it is because he said that he was liable to IRS law, and then didn't file the right forms in the correct way. It is up to his attorneys to battle it out with the IRS. Because the IRS Code, and the Code of Federal Regulations for the IRS Code, are so convoluted (they include dips into Title 27 which is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Code, and the regs for Title 27), it could take a lifetime to determine who is right. The IRS might simply drop the case because it would be too expensive for them to fight it.

In our eyes, it might look like Trump didn't pay the taxes he legally owed. Our judgment might be right, or it might be wrong. It might not seem fair to us - because we have unwittingly been duped into voluntarily accepting the IRS as our taxing authority - but if the IRS won't fight Trump, and if Trump is getting away with not having to fight, there isn't really anything that he is doing illegally.

Tax avoidance is covered within loopholes that exist within law but when it comes to Trump this is taking it a bit too far by any stretch of the imagination: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/07/ten-years-of-trump-tax-info-ob.html

Donald Trump paid zero income taxes in 8 of the 10 years examined by the Times between 1985 to 1994. "His losses were so big that in 1991 they accounted for fully 1% of all business losses declared that year by individual American taxpayers," wrote Susanne Craig.

Here are some excerpts from the link:

- The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade

- His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.

Lots more going on, the full article can be read here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/07/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html

So where does the line become crossed between showing loses on core businesses and actually taking the mickey out of legal tax loopholes? Here is the key question:

------

Does a businessman taking advantage of tax loopholes deserve to be US President?

or

Does a businessman taking advantage of tax loopholes deserve to be US President because is clever to legally exploit the system?