In the presidential debate Sunday in St. Louis, Donald Trump would not say how many years he was able not to pay federal income taxes.
When asked directly – “Can you say how many years you have avoided paying personal federal income taxes?” – Trump flat out refused.
“No, but I pay tax and pay federal tax, too,” Trump said, demurring on federal income taxes.
Trump’s income taxes have become a major theme of the campaign as Trump has refused to release his personal income tax returns to the public in disregard of a long tradition of transparency.
The New York Times did publish a portion of Trump’s 1995 tax return earlier this month, which showed that Trump had reported more than $900 million in operating losses that would have allowed him not to pay taxes for the following 15 years.
Trump added Sunday, “I have a write-off, a lot of it is depreciation.”
Trump was asked directly “did you use the loss to avoid paying personal federal income taxes?”
“Of course I do,” Trump said. “So do all of her donors or most of her donors. I know many of her donors. They took massive tax writeoffs.”
My question from the beginning of this issue has been, why doesn’t he release (or be asked to release) returns for years previous to the year for which he’s being audited?
I believe one of the replies was “the American people are too dumb to understand our taxes.” This was from one of his sons.
It’s like a game show: “Can you fill in the blanks?”
I’m astonshed The Media has proclaimed Trump the “winner” of this debate. The man is a serial liar. Everything that comes out of his mouth is either a lie or total BS. He then lies about his lies. Of course he can’t release his tax returns because of what it will show. It would be totally damning. So, he just wants (expects) us to “believe” what he says. But we know that everything is a lie. This is remarkable to me. What happened in the last 48 hours would sink any other candidate, but not Donald Trump. He can lie his way out of anything!
Media not proclaiming anything like this.They don’t seem to be calling him or her a winner. It’s a horse race so the talkers have to talk. But by any measure he didn’t “win” and was evasive, he dissembled and outright lied.