l*******2
发帖数: 1 | 1 The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than
two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit
battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the
presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely
because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger
of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of
millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed.
Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal
Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he
claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could
cost him more than $100 million.
The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story
fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His
reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of
millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively
employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting,
the records show that he depends more and more on making money from
businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest
with his job as president.
The New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two
decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his
business organization, including detailed information from his first two
years in office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019.
This article offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional
articles will be published in the coming weeks.
The returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records
in recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across
his endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors,
opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought
to excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings
will leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They
comprise information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the
findings of an independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump
owns hundreds of millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not
reveal his true wealth. Nor do they reveal any previously unreported
connections to Russia.
In response to a letter summarizing The Times’s findings, Alan Garten, a
lawyer for the Trump Organization, said that “most, if not all, of the
facts appear to be inaccurate” and requested the documents on which they
were based. After The Times declined to provide the records, in order to
protect its sources, Mr. Garten took direct issue only with the amount of
taxes Mr. Trump had paid.
“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars
in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in
personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in
a statement.
With the term “personal taxes,” however, Mr. Garten appears to be
conflating income taxes with other federal taxes Mr. Trump has paid —
Social Security, Medicare and taxes for his household employees. Mr. Garten
also asserted that some of what the president owed was “paid with tax
credits,” a misleading characterization of credits, which reduce a business
owner’s income-tax bill as a reward for various activities, like historic
preservation.
The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from
write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a
family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the
president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
Together with related financial documents and legal filings, the records
offer the most detailed look yet inside the president’s business empire.
They reveal the hollowness, but also the wizardry, behind the self-made-
billionaire image — honed through his star turn on “The Apprentice” —
that helped propel him to the White House and that still undergirds the
loyalty of many in his base.
Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than
being one in real life.
“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that
flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4
million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of
that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years
since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received
from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his
collapse in the early 1990s.
Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in
2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at
least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.
As the legal and political battles over access to his tax returns have
intensified, Mr. Trump has often wondered aloud why anyone would even want
to see them. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated
Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the
annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has
pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely
profitable, business universe.
In fact, those public filings offer a distorted picture of his financial
state, since they simply report revenue, not profit. In 2018, for example,
Mr. Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9
million. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of his bottom
line: $47.4 million in losses.
Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every
business expense Mr. Trump claims to reduce his taxable income — for
instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and
administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased
fivefold from 2016 to 2017. And he has previously bragged that his ability
to get by without paying taxes “makes me smart,” as he said in 2016. But
the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen,
showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is
taking out.
The picture that perhaps emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures
and tax schedules prepared by Mr. Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-
president in a tightening financial vise.
Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf
courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing
millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.
His revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up,
and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have
helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.
The tax audit looms.
And within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans —
obligations for which he is personally responsible — will come due.
Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the
actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Mr. Trump’s refusal
to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House. His
properties have become bazaars for collecting money directly from lobbyists,
foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the
records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.
At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting
in 2015 allowed him to pocket an additional $5 million a year from the
business. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $
397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event
during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.
The Times was also able to take the fullest measure to date of the president
’s income from overseas, where he holds ultimate sway over American
diplomacy. When he took office, Mr. Trump said he would pursue no new
foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White
House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73 million. And while much of that
money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from
licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny
geopolitics — for example, $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million
from India and $1 million from Turkey.
e reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In
2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S.
government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama,
the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.
Mr. Trump’s U.S. payment, after factoring in his losses, was roughly
equivalent, in dollars not adjusted for inflation, to another presidential
tax bill revealed nearly a half-century before. In 1973, The Providence
Journal reported that, after a charitable deduction for donating his
presidential papers, Richard M. Nixon had paid $792.81 in 1970 on income of
about $200,000.
The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar
returns available for the American people to see. | l****t
发帖数: 36289 | | l*******g
发帖数: 27064 | 3 麻痹的看来是有组织有目的的啊
可惜的是通篇都没有任何实证，全是各种下结论 | k****r
发帖数: 421 | 4 弯弯的菜菜子赶紧去卖逼，帮川普把钱垫上
than
largely
danger
【在 l*******2 的大作中提到】
: The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than
: two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit
: battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
: Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the
: presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
: He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely
: because he reported losing much more money than he made.
: As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger
: of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of
: millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed.
| k**********4
发帖数: 16092 | 5 部分全文?
than
largely
danger
【在 l*******2 的大作中提到】
: The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than
: two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit
: battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
: Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the
: presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
: He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely
: because he reported losing much more money than he made.
: As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger
: of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of
: millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed.
|
|
