BREAKING; The New York Times Has Obtained TRUMP'S Tax-Return Data Extending Over More Than Two Decades

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

9-27-2020

TIMES EXCLUSIVE
9-27-2020

TIMES EXCLUSIVE
TRUMP’S TAXES SHOW CHRONIC LOSSES AND YEARS OF TAX AVOIDANCE

The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.

The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business organization, including detailed information from his first two years in office.

It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be published in the coming weeks.

The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors, opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to excavate the enigmas of his finances.

(((( this is a long read but a must-read,,
the NY Times has investigated for a long time and teams of its lawyers to authorise against lawsuit etc etc)))

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

The New York Times revealed that among the reports they have about President Donald Trump’s taxes is that he’s been making huge amounts of money off of licensing for “The Apprentice,” which he uses to support his fledging resorts and clubs. But as that money slows, about $421 million in bills are coming due.

“Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire,” said the Times.

“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.”

The report went on to calculate that Trump made more money playing a businessman on television than he did being a businessman in real life if his tax records are any indication.

“‘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 Times’s analysis of the records found,” the report continued.
“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.”

The documents reveal that his largest golf resort, Trump National Doral, had $162.3 million in losses since he purchased it for $150 million in 2012.

His tax records show that $213 million was put into Doral and about $125 million in mortgage bills are about to be due in the next three years.

It adds to $63.6 million in losses for his three European properties.
He also reported $315.6 million in losses from his golf courses and a $55.5 million-loss in 2018 for his Trump International Hotel down the White House street.

All of the loses from the sorts have been paid for, the Times said, by “marking his cash infusions as a loan with an ever-increasing balance, his tax records show.
In 2016, he gave up on getting paid back and turned the loan into a cash contribution.”

“Rather than making him wealthier, the tax records reveal as never before, each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line,” the report revealed.

Trump is responsible for the loans and other debts totaling a whopping $421 million. Those bills come due in the next four years.

“Should he win re-election, his lenders could be placed in the unprecedented position of weighing whether to foreclose on a sitting president,” said the Times.

Trump has called all of it “fake news.”

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

Trump has been writing off money he gave to
Ivanka by calling her a ‘contractor’

President Donald Trump’s taxes are being reported by the New York Times
revealing ways in which his daughter Ivanka has been getting millions
from her father and avoiding paying the proper amount of tax on it.

The report detailed that Trump has tried to write-off things
like family vacations while claiming to be a billionaire with
nearly half a billion dollars in debt.

Gift taxes are when a living person gives over $15,000 to a person,
and Trump has given Ivanka much more than that.
But to get around it, he calls his money to her “contractor fees,”
which she declares as “income.”

She’s also had nearly $100,000 in fees for her hair and makeup
paid by the president for years.

“Mr. Trump has written off as business expenses costs —
including fuel and meals — associated with his aircraft,
used to shuttle him among his various homes and properties.”

“Likewise, the cost of haircuts, including the more than $70,000 paid
to style his hair during ‘The Apprentice.’
Together, nine Trump entities have written off at least $95,464 paid to
a favorite hair and makeup artist of Ivanka Trump.”

In her public filings, Ivanka Trump said she was paid through TTT Consulting,
LLC, which she indicated previously was giving “consulting, licensing,
and management services for real estate projects.”
It’s one of many companies connected to the Trump family under the tame TTT or TTTT.

“Like her brothers Donald Jr. and Eric, Ms. Trump was a longtime employee
of the Trump Organization and an executive officer for more
than 200 Trump companies that licensed or managed
hotel and resort properties,” the report said.

“The tax records show that the three siblings had each drawn a salary
from their father’s company — roughly $480,000 a year,
jumping to about $2 million after Mr. Trump became president —
though Ms. Trump no longer receives a salary.

What’s more, Mr. Trump has said the children were intimately involved
in negotiating and managing his projects. When asked in a 2011 lawsuit deposition
whom he relied on to handle important details of his licensing deals,
he named only Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric.”

5 takeaways from NY Times report on Trump's tax returns
Associated Press
PAUL WISEMAN and CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, Associated Press • September 27, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — A New York Times report that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House — and, thanks to colossal losses, no income tax at all in 11 of the 18 years that the Times reviewed — served to raise doubts about Trump's self-image as a shrewd and successful businessman.

That Sunday's report came just weeks before Trump's re-election bid served to intensify the spotlight on Trump the businessman — an identity that he has spent decades cultivating and that helped him capture the presidency four years ago in his first run for political office. The Times’ report deepens the uncertainty surrounding a tumultuous presidential campaign set against the backdrop of a viral pandemic, racial unrest in American cities and a ferocious battle over the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Since entering the White House, Trump has broken with tradition set by his predecessors by not only refusing to release his tax returns but by waging a legal battle to keep them hidden. The Times report suggests why that might have been so. It reported that many of Trump’s top businesses are losing money, even as those losses have helped him shrink his federal tax bill to essentially nothing.

Eugene Steuerle, a tax expert at the Urban Institute, said he wasn’t surprised that it turns out that Trump had paid almost no federal income tax. Most commercial real estate developers deduct large interest payments on their debts from taxable income, thereby lowering their tax bills. Typically, they also often avoid capital gains taxes by plowing profits from the sale of one building into the purchase of another.

“Most tax experts expected you would find little in the way of tax payments by President Trump,” said Steuerle, who served as a Treasury Department official under President Ronald Reagan.

The Times noted that Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said of the Times report that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate” and asked for the documents on which the reporting was based, which the Times declined to provide in order to protect its sources. The Times said Garten then directly disputed only the amount of taxes Trump had paid.

Here are some key takeaways from the Times’ reporting:

TRUMP PAID JUST $750 IN TAXES IN BOTH 2016 and 2017.

The newspaper said Trump initially paid $95 million in taxes over the 18 years it studied. But he managed to recover most of that money by claiming — and receiving — a stunning $72.9 million federal tax refund. According to the Times, Trump also pocketed $21.2 million in state and local refunds, which are typically based on federal filings.

Trump's outsize refund became the subject of a now-long-standing Internal Revenue Service audit of his finances. The audit was widely known. Trump has claimed it was the very reason why he cannot release his returns. But the Times report is the first to identify the issue that was mainly in dispute.

As a result of the refund, Trump paid an average $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2000 to 2017, the Times reported. By contrast, the average U.S. taxpayer in the top .001% of earners paid about $25 million annually over the same timeframe.

TRUMP HAS FINANCED AN EXTRAVAGANT LIFESTYLE WITH THE USE OF BUSINESS EXPENSES.

From his homes, his aircraft — and $70,000 on hair styling during his television show “The Apprentice” — Trump has capitalized on cost incurred from his businesses to finance a luxurious lifestyle.

The Times noted that Trump's homes, planes and golf courses are part of the Trump family business and, as such, Trump classified them as business expenses as well. Because companies can write off business expenses as deductions, all such expenses have helped reduce Trump’s tax liability.

MANY OF HIS BEST-KNOWN BUSINESSES ARE MONEY-LOSERS

The president has frequently pointed to his far-flung hotels, golf courses and resorts as evidence of his success as a developer and businessman. Yet these properties have been been draining money.

The Times reported that Trump has claimed $315 million in losses since 2000 on his golf courses, including the Trump National Doral near Miami, which Trump has portrayed as a crown jewel in his business empire. Likewise, his Trump International Hotel in Washington has lost $55 million, the Times reported.

FOREIGN VISITORS HAVE HELPED SUPPORT TRUMP'S PROPERTIES

Since Trump began his presidential run, lobbyists, foreign governments and politicians have lavished significant sums of money on his properties, a spending spree that raised questions about its propriety and legality.

The Times report illustrates just how much that spending has been: Since 2015, his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida has taken in $5 million more a year from a surge in membership. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association spent at least $397,602 in 2017 at Trump's Washington hotel. Overseas projects have produced millions more for Trump — $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey.

TRUMP WILL FACE FINANCIAL PRESSURE AS DEBTS COME DUE

Trump seems sure to face heavy financial pressures from the enormous pile of debt he has absorbed. The Times said the president appears to be responsible for $421 million in loans, most of which will come due within four years. On top of that, a $100 million mortgage on Trump Tower in New York will come due in 2022.

Posts : 429 Join date : 2018-12-29

One day the left calls him a billionare, the next day they claim he's broke.
Fuk the fake news - I believe nothing.

Regular Member Posts : 7317 Join date : 2014-07-29

Bill de Blasio announces investigation into whether Donald Trump paid city taxes saying it's 'a foregone conclusion' that he 'cheated New York City' out of millions

Our city finance department will get to work right away to determine if in fact the president of the United States cheated New York City on his taxes.

The mayor of New York has said he will task the city's finance department with investigating whether Donald Trump has paid his city taxes, in the wake of a bombshell New York Times investigation into the president's finances.

Bill de Blasio said on Monday night that he had his suspicions that the president swindled his hometown.

'I think it's a foregone conclusion at this point, given everything we've seen from this guy.'

NYT's Hit Piece Includes Its Own Fact Check: Trump Paid $1 Million in 2016 and $4.2 Million in 2017 to US Treasury
By Joe Saunders | The Western Journal
Published September 29, 2020 at 8:41am

The New York Times never lets the facts get in the way of a good story – it just buries them so far down no one will see.

Then it buries its own credibility, too.

That was the case Sunday when the most biased “news” organization in the country published its latest in-kind donation to the Democratic Party in the form of a nearly 10,000-word account of President Donald Trump’s income tax history, deliberately written to cast Trump as a villain to hard-working, taxpaying Americans.

But one key fact buried by The Times gives the game away on how misleading the article actually was.

The so-called “newspaper of record” started out the article with sentences apparently aimed at Everyman: It didn’t talk in billions or millions of dollars, figures most Americans don’t deal with on a regular basis (even Times readers).

Under the ominous headline “Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance,” it claimed that a billionaire who became president of the United States had “paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.”

That’s in the lede. The first sentence of a story that should set the tone for everything that follows.

Unfortunately for the no-doubt rapidly diminishing number of Americans who actually believe The Times can be trusted, that sentence set a tone of bias and outright dishonesty that the article itself admits in a disguised fact check a long 77 paragraphs later.

Trump did pay millions in taxes those years: $1 million in 2016; $4.2 million in 2017.

“As he settled into the Oval Office, his tax bills soon returned to form,” The Times wrote, deep, deep, deep into the story. “His potential taxable income in 2016 and 2017 included $24.8 million in profits from sources related to his celebrity status and $56.4 million for the loans he did not repay. The dreaded alternative minimum tax would let his business losses erase only some of his liability.

“Each time, he requested an extension to file his 1040; and each time, he made the required payment to the I.R.S. for income taxes he might owe — $1 million for 2016 and $4.2 million for 2017. But virtually all of that liability was washed away when he eventually filed, and most of the payments were rolled forward to cover potential taxes in future years.”

To repeat: Trump “made the required payment to the I.R.S. for income taxes he might owe,” The Times wrote, followed by the figures $1 million for one year, $4.2 million for the second. (Emphasis in the quote added, obviously.)

In other words, Trump did in fact pay considerably more than $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017 — he just didn’t actually owe what he paid.

In fact, an argument could be made that since those payments actually amounted to overpayments, when Trump’s final liability was established at the laughably low figure of $750, the whole incident redounds to the president’s favor. Since the money wasn’t returned, but “rolled forward to cover potential taxes for future years,” Trump was, in effect, giving the federal government about $5 million until some future date.

The rest of the article amounts to a propaganda gift to the presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, typical of The Times anti-Trump machine.

It’s paragraph after biased paragraphed, stuffed with dollar signs and financial details that make it appear there are all kinds of sordid maneuverings going on, but probably describes the kind of totally legal tax minimization strategies employed by the wealthiest Americans regardless of party.

Is it any wonder that on Sunday, Trump used a White House media briefing to pan The Times piece as “totally false“?

It’s important to note that the word “illegal” is not one of the almost-10,000 words The Times unleashed to attack the president on the eve of the first Trump-Biden debate. (It did use the word “illegality,” but only quoting a New York state regulator – no doubt a Democrat – and discussing activities of the Trump Foundation, not the president’s taxes.) Think there’s a reason for that?

It’s just as important to note that any businessman or woman in the United States, from a mom-and-pop diner to the titans of industry, will take every step possible to minimize their payments to the IRS.

Every year, the country’s law schools churn out countless attorneys who specialize in the tax code because it’s an area of law that’s in constant demand – particularly among the uber-wealthy, like Trump, who employ legions of accounting and legal minds to make sure their taxes are as low as possible.

The final bill, as The Times’ own story demonstrates, is up to the IRS, the individual and the lawyers and accountants involved — it’s not The New York Times editorial board or the empty-headed firebrands at MSNBC who get to determine how much Donald Trump owes in taxes.

The IRS doesn’t consult journalists to decide how much New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. must pay in taxes, or Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos needs to kick in to Uncle Sam.

But journalists do get to decide how to frame a story, and that decision is a matter of the public trust – one journalists should have the personal and professional integrity to honor.

When a news outlet like The Times chooses to use a mammoth “news” story to attack the president of the United States in the weeks before an election, and it uses a barely credible distortion of reality in the opening sentences of its piece, then forces the reader to wade through reams innuendo to get to the actual fact, it violates that trust.

It’s nothing new to the biased Times, of course – the paper has been on a vendetta against Trump since he first came down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce for the presidency in 2015.

But it’s as damning as ever to the state of journalism as practiced in the 21st century.

The biased mainstream media has buried the facts about Trump and his presidency for so long, they’ve buried their own credibility long since.

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The third in the series focused on how Trump concluded he only needed to pay $750 in federal income taxes.

“The small amount of federal income taxes President Trump paid in both 2016 and 2017 — just $750 each year — has become the focus of much attention since it was revealed in a New York Times investigation. The figures below, drawn from Mr. Trump’s tax-return data for 2017, show how his accountants arrived at that figure for one of those years,” the newspaper reported.

The newspaper showed Trump reporting a total income of negative $12,819,400 after losing over $15 million from his business, losing $12 million in other income — offsetting his interest and capitol gains.

Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.
“He was, however, still subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax, a parallel tax system that reduces the benefit of some deductions, preventing wealthy people from erasing their tax liability altogether. Most significantly, the A.M.T. formula disallowed $45 million in losses that Mr. Trump had carried over from prior years,” the newspaper reported. “But tax laws gave him one more line on which to reduce the A.M.T. Mr. Trump had $22.7 million in General Business Credit, much of it carried forward from prior years, that he could apply. The credit is a smorgasbord of tax incentives and givebacks to business owners, and in Mr. Trump’s case they ranged from credits of $322,926 for Social Security and Medicare taxes paid on employee tips to at least $1.5 million related to rehabilitating the Old Post Office in Washington.”

“The business credit cannot be used to get a refund; it can only be applied against taxes owed. Mr. Trump had more than enough to cancel out his $7,435,857 tax bill. But on the Form 3800 for the General Business Credit, his accountants subtracted $750 from his allowable credit. Why they did that is not clear. But the result was a total federal income tax liability of $750,” the newspaper reported.

Posts : 429 Join date : 2018-12-29

I hoap Trump sues them for ever penny they got for plastering his income/tax info all over the place.
Not ONE of us would stand for that shit.

louie wrote:: I hoap Trump sues them for ever penny they got for plastering his income/tax info all over the place.
Not ONE of us would stand for that shit.

NYT’s Hit Piece Includes Its Own Fact Check: Trump Paid $1 Million in 2016 and $4.2 Million in 2017 to US Treasury

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