Trump campaign senior adviser Brad Parscale tackled by police and committed for mental health care, accused of domestic violence, brandishing firearms
Parscale is currently serving as the senior adviser for data and digital operations for Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Scandal of the decade
(A guy who fought for America instead of a Confederate General who fought against America.)
Trump claims most of his businesses are losing money, so much money that he pays no taxes. This is the man who also claims to be a great businessman making lots of money. His own tax forms, his personal statements, no one else’s, say his businesses are bigly money losers.
It’s not loopholes – he’s saying his businesses have been gigantic loss makers every single year for decades.
It’s almost certainly tax fraud, including paying Ivanka as a consultant when she was an employee, and deducting those “consultant” fees on his taxes.
He’s also $421 million in personal debt. Significant delinquent debt normally disqualifies most people from a government security clearance.
Trump Organization debt was reported at $1.1 billion (mostly real estate loans).
Eric Trump statement in 2014: “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Now ask to whom does Trump owe the hundreds of millions of dollars coming due soon?
"A report found that undocumented immigrants contributed $11.7 billion in taxes per year. This accounts for an average 8 percent of their income— in other words, nearly $3,000 per annum. To put this into perspective, the top 1 percent of earners in the US pay only a mere 5.4 percent (or in Trump’s case, often 0 percent) of their own income.
Contribution to US taxes by undocumented migrants has kept Medicare and social security solvent. Sadly, however, being undocumented, they are unlikely to ever benefit from their input. In 2013, the Social Security Administration discovered undocumented migrants contributed over $13 billion in a single year to the retirement trust fund. It has often been argued that a simple approach to improve migrant tax compliance is to create a simpler path to citizenship — and indeed many undocumented immigrants pay taxes in the hope that this will stand them in good stead if they eventually do apply to be naturalized.
To add to the irony, it is Trump who has been costing the taxpayer millions of dollars. His all-to-frequent vacations in Mar-a-Lago alone have cost the American taxpayer over $130 million. It is therefore unsurprising that he bragged in the past about how not paying taxes makes him “smart.”"
Trump 2020: “Read my lips, no new taxes [for me]”
From Bloomberg. Published today:
Trump’s $73 Million Tax Refund Stuck With Little-Known Panel
(Bloomberg) – The details published about Donald Trump’s tax returns were a revelation to the public but not to a small group of attorneys who work for a little-known congressional panel. Trump has been in the middle of a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a 2010 claim of a $72.9 million tax refund, according to the New York Times, which obtained more than 20 years of the president’s tax data. The size of the refund claim brought it before the Joint Committee on Taxation. Whenever there is a proposed refund of more than $2 million for individuals and $5 million for corporations proposed, the committee staff reviews it before payment by the IRS. Part of the rationale for such reviews is to make sure tax laws are working the way Congress intended.
In Trump’s case, the IRS initially sent an audit of the refund to the joint committee in 2011 and an agreement was reached in 2014. But an expanding audit meant that the IRS resubmitted the refund documentation for review in 2016, where it has sat unresolved since then, the Times reported. Trump received what tax professionals refer to as a “quickie refund,” a check processed in 90 days on a tentative basis, pending an audit by the IRS, the Times reported. The committee staff reviewed between 470 and 370 proposed refunds per year from 2015 to 2018, according to a congressional aide. Most of the proposed refunds involved net operating loss carry-back provisions, in which a business uses losses in one year to offset profits in another, sometimes resulting in refunds of “hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Kenneth Kies, who was chief of staff for the panel from 1994 to 1998.
Thomas A. Barthold, current chief of staff for the joint committee, said the staff “does not comment on the receipt of any review case, nor comment on when any review case’s review has been completed.” Occasionally, the staff disagrees with IRS and the tax agency usually wouldn’t proceed with a refund over the objections of the committee, Kies said, though the law doesn’t compel the IRS to accept the panel’s determination. Much of the review work is done by lawyers from the committee who work onsite at the IRS, added Kies, now managing director of the Federal Policy Group, which provides advice to clients on tax policy matters. The joint committee’s role reviewing tax refunds goes back to 1927, one year after the committee was formed, said George Yin, another former chief of staff and a
retired University of Virginia law professor. The panel took up the task after there were accusations of favoritism over large refunds made during the 1920s under Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Differences over the proposed amount of a refund were usually worked out between committee staff and IRS personnel, Yin said. Yin said lower-level staff only “very infrequently” were unable to resolve differences with the IRS during his tenure from 2003-2005. There are 10 members of Congress, five from the House and five from the Senate with bipartisan representation on the joint committee. Their role is largely symbolic, and they aren’t involved in reviewing confidential taxpayer returns. No member of Congress ever became involved in a refund review or saw tax documents from such a review while he was chief of staff, Yin said.
David Noren, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery who worked for the panel from 2001-2006, said it generally took the committee about three weeks to complete a refund review, but it wasn’t unusual for the process to last much longer if there were complex issues identified to review with the IRS.
“Any case involving a sitting president would not be run of the mill,” Noren said. “This situation with a sitting president is a completely extraordinary set of circumstances.” If the IRS formally denies the refund, the disappointed taxpayer can sue in U.S. District Court where he or she lives or in the Federal Court of Claims.
Personally, the other reason is building a stronger case for tax reform to close some of these legal loopholes. Regardless of the method, this low level of taxation for ultra-rich people is disgraceful in a system that tells the masses it is progressive so that supposedly each taxpayer pay their fair share based on actual income.
Some kind of rebated consumption tax would hopefully take a bite out of these situations because regardless of how you earn it, your lifestyle is gonna be defined by your consumption so you shouldn’t be able to get out of paying taxes completely unless you actually don’t spend any of it (but then again you may only be delaying taxation in that scenario, not avoiding completely).
I’m guessing that this $73M is part of the “potential $100M tax bill” Trump is supposedly so worried about. If you round up, it could be the entire concern.
I kind of understand the delay - it’s tough to make a decision over $73M, involving someone who’s essentially your boss. If the IRS was sitting on the money I’d disagree, but Trump already received the tentative money so the final determination should wait until after he’s out of office.
There are no loopholes involved. A loophole is used to get from point A to point B, when going from point A to point B is not allowed. This is very straightforward tax law, that all businesses follow and benefit from. The reforms you seem to want wouldnt be reforms, it’d be targeting large numbers - effectively punishing businesses for becoming too successful.
This would be fair. It’s also spark even more outrage, since the wealthy would be paying similar dollar amounts as the poor, and a much lower percentage of their income. Or do you mean to add this consumption tax in addition to income tax, as a means of syphoning even more away from successful people?
In Trump’s case it’s not about loopholes. It is instead about VERY complex IRS rules which impact especially those persons involved with real estate who very often show paper losses.
This tax thing, perhaps more than anything else prior, highlights the fact that Trump is not a traditional politician. Savvy politicians would never become involved in complex real estate deals which, they would know, could be used to impugn them in an election setting.
To the extent Trump continues to want to be a politician, current events are merely an additional part of his education regarding exactly what that pursuit entails. Whether or not he will politically survive this learning curve is another question entirely.
For Trump it’s not loopholes. He claims most of his businesses have been losing money every year for decades.
Eric Trump statement in 2014: “We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Donald has $421 million in personal debt. Who do you think he owes money to?
Again, actually a major surprise for the NY Times, contained within their illegally obtained Trump tax records, was the lack of Russian involvement. The Times was poised to jump all over Trump on Russia, but the supporting data was nowhere to be found in those records.
The fact this is a “revelation” only shows how ignorant people are. Or maybe more accurately, how ignorant the Democrats expect their minions to be.
$400 million owed on billions of dollars of property. How terrible.
This is only bad for Trump, not the country. Some of that debt may be attached to property he’d typically just let go rather than pay off/refinance, due to values crashing. Obviously, because of optics he can’t do that now.
He also has billions in assets. Wealthy businesses often carry lots of debt because it’s cost effective leverage, not because they “owe money to” anyone out of necessity.
Debate talking point preview from the Trump side.
Sure must be nice to be Hunter with all those free millions from his Russian and Chinese friends.
There’s a lot of good stuff in there. But a lot of those questions should rightfully be ignored - they’re bait that advance a conclusion rather than ask a question.
“Are you refusing to answer whether you will go along with this radical plan because you are too weak to stand up to it?”
That’s just a crap question to pose. While adding seats the the Supreme Court is a very valid subject, the premise of the question being asked is not valid (it’s pushing a biased narrative). If they want the debate(s) to be productive, they need to be much more discrete while backing Biden into a corner.
Definitely valid to discuss a Supreme Court representation more consistent with the population’s composition rather than the senate. The process is not immutable, it was never intended to be. The size of the Court and the process have changed many times in the nation’s history and future changes would not be unprecedented.
Finally accepting new states is also a perfectly valid subject, we’ve added new states many times in the past.
Abolishing the electoral college has also had broad bipartisan support in the recent past.
There’s lots of “valid subjects” for public discourse.