The most shocking part of Donald Trump’s tax records isn’t $916 million loss being talked about
Last edited Mon Oct 3, 2016, 11:09 AM - Edit history (4)
Title edit: "talked," not "talkied."
From Allan Sloan, who used to write for Fortune. Neither Donald Trump nor any of his ITT Technical Institute-trained CPAs will be able to pull the wool over the eyes of Allan Sloan.
Break out your Accounting 101 textbooks. You'll need them.
Full disclosure: I am not an accountant, but my family is full of them.
[font color=red]Also full disclosure: I have a 401(k) and an FSA. I am playing catchup with my 401(k) funding. I went through this year's FSA in no time, so next year's amount will be bigger. My IRA is a Roth IRA, which is funded with after-tax money. I take all the deductions that I am allowed.[/font]
I haven't read any articles that have said that Trump isn't doing anything that violates the tax code. He is doing what I am doing, only on an immensely larger scale. I, though, am willing to disclose that I am enjoying the full use of all my allowable deductions.
By Allan Sloan October 2 at 4:22 PM
Despite what Donald Trump says, we really can learn a lot from his tax returns — even from the partial ones made public by The New York Times.
The major takeaway from the three pages of Trump’s 1995 returns that the Times made public is that Trump is right when he says the system is rigged. What he doesn’t say is that it’s rigged in his favor and in the favor of people like him — and against regular people, those of us who earn money, pay income tax on it, and financially support the country in which we live. ... To keep things relatively simple, I’m telling you what I see in Trump’s returns, based on my decades of experience parsing financial filings. I will try not to get bogged down in numbers and technicalities.
{‘The whole chessboard’: A new document reveals Donald Trump’s economic strategy in detail}
Sure, the $900 million-plus of losses reported by the New York Times — losses that could be used to offset income for a total of 18 years — are totally shocking. Legal, yes. But shocking. ... But there’s something I consider even more shocking — although it involves a much smaller number.
By my read of the Trump tax return published by the New York Times, he would have been tax-free because of a $15,818,562 loss reported on Line 11 of the return under “Rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” It looks to me that this loss reflects the outrageous, special tax break that real estate developers that people like Trump can get, but that the rest of us can’t. ... To give you the brief version, people who qualify as real estate developers or managers can use depreciation deductions to offset non-real-estate income. But people who don’t qualify for this special treatment can’t do that. (For full details, ask a tax expert about Section 469 of the tax code.)
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Allan Sloan is a columnist for The Washington Post. He is a seven-time winner of the Loeb Award, business journalism's highest honor.
Well, gee, it looks as if someone can too understand the tax return of someone of Trump's unimaginable wealth.
= new reply since forum marked as read
IMO, the bigger takeaway is he just outed the wealthy and corporations that have been screwing everyone over for years. Austerity my ass, there went raises, healthcare and more.
Now it will get interesting to see the overall fallout 
