Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Trump & Taxes
On Sunday, the New York Times released details about President Trump's tax returns from the last two decades (up through the 2017 tax year). Among the findings: that in 2017, Trump paid just $750 in taxes, and in most of the years in that period he paid none at all.
Trump responded by saying (1) that the documents were illegally obtained, and (2) that they were fake. Only one of those can be right, though-- because if they are fake they were not illegally obtained. Not that internal logic matters in these things, apparently.
Some are leaping to the conclusion that Trump committed the crime of tax evasion (that is, illegally avoiding tax liabilities through misstatements, as opposed to tax avoidance, which can be done through legal maneuvers). Of course, tax returns alone can't show tax evasion, by definition. So we don't know if that is true or not, and people should hold off on convicting him of that.
However, the other alternative is probably worse. Because if our tax system is such that a guy with his own Trump helicopter and Trump plane and a $100,000,000 apartment with gold fixtures pays almost no federal tax, that is really a terrible system.
I don't think this disclosure will affect the election much one way or another... but it should affect the way we think about taxation in the United States.
