The New York Times released a copy of Donald Trump's tax returns from 1995 on Saturday, revealing Trump had written a $916 million loss for the year, which could have allowed him to pay no income tax for 18 years, according to the New York Times.
This loss was justified by the bankruptcy of Trump's casinos in Atlantic City as well as a few other failed investments. These may or may not be real losses, according to the Washington Post, which called them "paper losses" in an opinionated article on the issue. The Washington post also claimed that Trump could have been avoiding taxes from his real-estate business as well.
This would all mean that Trump had been using loopholes his entire business career to avoid paying taxes, legally. As the Washington Post points out, he used part of the tax code which help only the top earners in the country, while leaving the middle class to carry the most burden of the income tax.
To put all this into perspective, imagine you are the parent of the average high school senior. Your child would have presumably been in school for 12 years and have used the bus to get to school at some point or you yourself would have driven them. To run a public school, a Board of Education needs money to pay for books, teachers, administrators, other staff and basic upkeep of the building itself.
Taxes would have paid for the roads your hypothetical child would have traveled on and their education experience.
Now, if your child is 18, and they have been in school for 12 years, Donald Trump has paid no income tax towards helping better that education system, nor the roads they traveled on. Now it could be argued that his kids went to private schools, but many middle class families who sent their children to private or parochial schools still pay taxes towards the education of students in public schools.
Trump's children did, however, travel on public roads to get to their schools.
Donald Trump has claimed to have fairly paid his taxes in all other areas, but if he is being thrifty and cutting corners in his income tax, who can say he isn't cutting corners elsewhere?
Either way, Trump has contributed much less of a percentage of his earnings than the average middle class family and dodged his responsibility as a US citizen. Your hypothetical high school senior would have received next to no help in their pursuit of education from Donald Trump.
Trump himself, as well as his campaign have claimed many times to "know the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for president and he is the only one that knows how to fix it," the Trump campaign said in a statement.
If this is true, why is he so proud of his accomplishment of skirting his civic responsibility? And why is he not fixing the tax code to ease the strain it puts on the middle class, while advocating more loopholes an tax breaks that would benefit people like him?
