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The New York Times newspaper claims in a new story that Trump has hardly paid taxes in the recent past. That is only partially true.
Trump is said to have paid just $ 750 in federal income taxes in the year he was elected president.
Has the New York Times made a big impact when it has identified chronic losses and years of tax evasion since the turn of the millennium in Donald Trump’s previously inaccessible tax documents?
There’s no question about it: the financial condition of the incumbent president and his relationship with the US tax authority, the IRS, are of interest to a broad audience. Trump himself fueled this interest by not disclosing his fiscal status on his own initiative, unlike any president before him since the mid-1970s.
Trump’s hidden tax returns have been troubling the American population for years; Here’s a photo from New York from April 2017.
With its latest exclusive investigation, the “New York Times” sheds only a limited light on the obscurity because it also does not want to publish the documents that were leaked to it. Its editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet, said the newspaper did not want to risk its sources and that huge personal risks were taken to keep the public informed. Baquet promises to publish more articles on the New York Times findings on Trump’s fiscal situation in the coming weeks.
The first three articles appeared on Sunday. The lead article begins by stating that Trump paid $ 750 in federal income taxes the year he was elected president. In his first year in the White House (2017), he repaid another $ 750. And in 10 of the previous 15 years, Trump paid no income taxes.
That actually sounds like very little taxes Trump is said to have paid. In 2017, the United States had 143.3 million taxpayers combined 1.6 trillion. $ collected in individual federal income taxes. That is more than $ 11,100 per taxpayer.
The presentation of the “New York Times” could be fairer if it really had all the relevant information. You need to dig into his posts released Sunday to find the indication that Trump’s federal income tax bill averaged $ 1.4 million for the years 2000 to 2017.
This means that Trump has paid more than $ 25 million in taxes over 18 years. However, The New York Times puts this in perspective, saying that, on average, 0.001% of the highest-income Americans, including Trump, paid about $ 25 million in federal income taxes during the same time period. In other words, Trump has paid about $ 400 million less in federal income taxes over the past two decades than would have been appropriate.
It is a shame that the New York Times did not choose a more transparent presentation and simply did not publish a simple line chart of Trump’s tax payments for the period 2000-2017. Or couldn’t he do that at all? In any case, the years in which Trump paid taxes in the millions, as well as those in which he paid no or very little taxes, would be visible at a glance. For once, one would almost like to agree with Trump when he called the “New York Times” story a hoax for the press, as he did on Sunday night.
There’s no question about it: Trump brands the successful entrepreneur before the public, while declaring chronic high losses to the IRS tax authority to minimize the tax burden. And the man in the White House is struggling with huge conflicts of interest in the presidency. Fashion representations like those in the New York Times are not the appropriate means of reporting such abuses.
