Donald Trump and the House of Representatives are in a fight to see the Orange One's tax returns. Despite the fight, information on his taxes keeps leaking out. And it's abundantly apparent why the president doesn't want anyone to see his returns. Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig write in The Toronto Star:
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir Trump: The Art of the Deal hit bookstores in 1987, Donald Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by the New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the centre of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.
The numbers show that in 1985, Trump reported losses of $46.1 million (U.S.) from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totalling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, the Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the IRS compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. 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 IRS information for those years.
Overall, Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the IRS later required changes after audits.
Trump sold himself as the man who knew how to handle the economy and who knew how to make deals. But the numbers tell a different story:
In the granular detail of tax results, it gives a precise accounting of the president’s financial failures and of the constantly shifting focus that would characterize his decades in business. In contrast to his father’s stable and profitable empire of rental apartments, Donald Trump’s primary sources of income changed year after year, from big stock earnings, to a single year of more than $67.1 million in salary, to a mysterious $52.9-million windfall in interest income. But always, those gains were overwhelmed by losses on his casinos and other projects.
In 1985, Trump appeared to be on top of the world.
As the year played out, he borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to fuel a wave of purchases, acquiring a second casino ($351.8 million), a Manhattan hotel ($80 million), the Mar-a-Lago property in Florida ($10 million), a New York hospital he intended to replace with an apartment building ($60 million) and an undeveloped expanse of railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan ($85 million).
His yearly carrying costs on the rail yards would rise to $18.7 million. He would not be able to convert Mar-a-Lago into a money-making club for another decade. The apartments on the hospital site would not be ready for sale, as Trump Palace, until 1990, and another residential project would be stalled for years.
Because his businesses were generally created as partnerships, the companies themselves did not pay federal income taxes. Instead their results wound up on Trump’s personal ledger.
Beyond the $46.1-million loss that his core businesses logged in 1985, Trump’s tax information shows that he carried over $5.6 million in losses from prior years. The IRS data on one-third of high-income tax returns that year lists only three taxpayers with greater losses.
This is a man who has never known what he's doing. And he's President of the United States.
Image: Truthdig
2 comments:
He's a reflection of the people who voted for him. These revelations won't mean anything to those guys and some of them will even find in them more reason to admire him. He knows that much and it might be all he needs to know to give him four more years.
He knows, like Orwell, that Ignorance is Strength, John.
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