NY Times: Trump’s 1995 business losses likely gave him write-offs to not pay taxes for years
Described as a bombshell by the media, Saturday’s New York Times report on Donald Trump 1995 tax return revealed such a massive financial loss that the mogul may not have paid taxes for the subsequent 20 eyars.
Trump reported $916 million in business losses in 1995, a number so substantial that it would have allowed Trump to avoid paying federal income taxes for 18 years, according to the Times.
“The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan,” the Time reported.
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The Times reported no data on income following the 1995 filing, but added that “a $916 million loss in 1995 would have been large enough to wipe out more than $50 million a year in taxable income over 18 years.”
“He has a vast benefit from his destruction” in the early 1990s, said one of the experts, Joel Rosenfeld, an assistant professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.
Rosenfeld explained that he would advise a client who came to him this tax return: “Do you realize you can create $916 million in income without paying a nickel in taxes?”
Trump declined to comment on the documents. Instead, the campaign released a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss.
“Mr. Trump is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the statement said. “That being said, Mr. Trump has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes and federal taxes.”
The statement continued, “Mr. Trump knows 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.”
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