AS PER USUAL: Democrats’ latest attack on Trump is a giant nothingburger.
House Democrats just set a precedent that will surely come back to haunt them. Using the power of the House Ways and Means Committee, they recently obtained and publicly released former President Donald Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. They did so because Trump refused to release his tax returns, like most presidential candidates do, and in hopes of somehow embarrassing or incriminating him.
It backfired spectacularly. . . .
Basically, the returns revealed that Trump claimed large losses from his various real estate and investment properties and declared this “negative income” to avoid paying much federal income tax over the five-year period, despite his self-declared wealth. In other words, he used perfectly legal deductions and loopholes in the tax code to pay as little in taxes as he could get away with under the law.
Shocking! Who wouldn’t want as little of their money stolen and wasted as possible?
It’s ironic, too, because the members of Congress complaining about Trump using tax loopholes are responsible for the tax code. Many of them have been in office for decades and could have changed these loopholes at any time. They didn’t do so because their donors and allies benefit too, but now they want to pretend it’s outrageous that Trump made use of them.
Yet what’s more important is what Trump’s tax returns did not show: any corrupt connection to Russia. Democrats for years suggested that the real reason Trump wouldn’t release his tax information was because it would show that Putin had something on him.
Just for an example, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in 2018, “The president has refused to release his tax returns, but these bizarre actions that he has taken, which seem so to indicate that President Putin has something over President Trump, something personal, and it might be financial. We need to see the tax returns.”
Well, now we have them, and Trump’s tax returns show nothing of the sort. It’s not exactly new at this point for Democratic warnings about Trump-Russia collusion to later prove baseless, but it’s still worth revisiting just how far removed from reality their claims were.
Yes, the tax returns did show that while in office, Trump held foreign bank accounts and his businesses conducted business internationally. But that’s not a surprise. The public elected him in part because he was a successful international businessman; what else would you then expect?
Time to finally pass the Hall-Rabushka flat tax. Not because it has anything to do with this, just because it’s time.