In its coverage of Trump the Times has tended to imply something sinister about NOL carryforwards. So if he is going backwards and not paying, that is the way it is supposed to work.Īnd sometimes you are allowed to carry your losses back (The law keeps changing back and forth on that) and forward. Generally you don’t pay when you are going backwards. he is losing his fortune, then he should not be paying very much if anything in income taxes. Trump’s core enterprises - from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington - report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise. The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life. The other is of someone whose fortune is melting away. One is of a very successful person who is managing to not pay any income taxes. The fundamental problem with the main story is that it is presenting two contradictory narratives. He told me that if the styling was taking place on the set with union stylists, it is perfectly reasonable. I reached out to my filmmaker friend Jonathan Schwartz of Audacious Media.
If the hairstyling is just for The Apprentice, that works out to about $400 per episode. Trump was in The Apprentice for 14 seasons and he is on television in a lot of other contexts. Regardless, apparently somebody went to the trouble of digging the hairstyling for television out of that morass and toting it up to be $70,000. The graphs show 2000 to 2018, which is odd because they say they did not get the 2018 return. Now they tell us that they have obtained “tax-return data extending over more than two decades”. On the underpaying tax theme the reporters seem to be on something of an Easter egg hunt trying to find little tidbits that will excite us.Įven while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.
Maybe there are a few people who were in it every year for decades, but I doubt it is many. I really don’t see the point of the comparison. Trump has paid about $400 million less in combined federal income taxes than a very wealthy person who paid the average for that group each year. 001 percent of tax filers - that is, the most affluent 1/100,000th slice of the population - was 24.1 percent, according to the I.R.S. In 2017, the average federal income rate for the highest-earning. In a side highlight piece by David Leonhard, there is a sort of odd comparison. And he has not been paying much if anything in the way of taxes which if the previous is true is not that shocking. More to the point they are disclosing that it appears that President Trump has flat out been losing a lot of money - hemorrhaging cash-, which we are supposed to be shocked at. But I don’t think of that as “concealing”. I have nightmares about inadvertently letting something out. “Long-Concealed”- As a CPA I am fanatical about protecting confidential client information. In some ways, the headline shows the problem with their perspective. The main story, Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses And Years Of Tax Avoidance, is kind of disappointing. I would have loved a spreadsheet presentation of the twenty-odd years of returns with line number references, but that is probably just me and a few hundred thousand others. One of the things that I did not learn until later in life is that there are many very intelligent people who cannot look at a column of numbers and have it mean anything to them.
I’m pretty sure “the guy” is our President. Have used, however, some first rate Covid-19 graphics from The Financial Times, which early on in the Pandemic led the way on worldwide comparisons of cases and deaths. Thanks for your good note, but I would never mention the guy in my new book.