NYT acquires 1995 Trump tax return; he deducted $916 million in business losses

[GeorgiaModerate]

How the f*** do you accrue $915 million in losses???

Let this be the October surprise lol.

He's an exceptional businessman.  This kind of loss is exceptional.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Maybe the Trump campaign really did leak this

1. It gives him a reason for not paying taxes
2. It makes him look sympathetic ("It was leaked without my permission!")
3. His supporters don't care because they're terrible people

I don't think he did. The only reason to leak the taxes himself was if they were fake and Trump wants to pull a fast one on NYT. I doubt they'd have run the story without verifying the document though.

Read the story.  Jack Mitnick, the accountant who prepared the return, confirmed to the Times that it's authentic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-taxes.html

[GeorgiaModerate]

The Times prints news.  Trump's taxes are news.  He made them so himself by his refusal to release his returns. 

[GeorgiaModerate]

Well, I guess we know why he doesn't want to release all of his returns.

What this has done is validate that Trump wouldn't release his tax returns because they contained something that looked bad (which most people suspected was the case).  What his continuing failure to release them indicates is that there's something still in them that would look even worse.

[GeorgiaModerate]

You know... I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but... the media has suddenly stopped talking about Trump's problems with women.

Well the documents were sent in an envelope with the address of Trump Tower.

This leak provides the context for all the other ones. When other tax returns are leaked, either by him or by someone else, showing that he paid no Federal income tax whilst earning a lot of money, then he won't have to explain it (having to explain things always looks bad) because the explanation would have been given in the media today.

That's one reason for him to leak this

It should say something if we're seriously considering that Trump might have leaked potentially damaging info (which this likely is, to a large number of voters) just to push some other damaging info out of the news cycle.

This reminds me of something Nate Silver talked about recently: there's so much stuff about Trump that there isn't enough news cycle to cover it all.  He quantified this by defining a "mitt" as a unit of shady/questionable/newsworthy stuff about a candidate.  1 mitt was defined as the amount of this clinging to Mitt Romney, a mostly straight-up guy.  Obama was also pretty clean, perhaps a little shadier than Romney; say 1.2 mitts.  Hillary Clinton, OTOH, has a lot more baggage, probably in the 5 mitt range.  But Trump is at least 50 mitts -- which is so far off the scale that it can't all be covered in depth.  So he only gets covered at about a level of about 7 or 8 mitts.  (This was written a few weeks ago; that number might be higher now.)

[GeorgiaModerate]

Trump is in trouble now.

(a) He lost someone else's money
(b) Then he paid no company tax for 18 years.

That is ruinous to his chances.

This was his personal tax return, not a corporate one.

[GeorgiaModerate]

This thread is too convoluted for me .  Here are my simple three takeaways:

1. The tax carry-forward losses that Trump took are legal.  They do not necessarily mean that he is a bad (or good) businessman nor do they mean that he did anything wrong.  Yes, the values involved are huge, but so is the book real estate value that they are likely based on.

2. Unfortunately, for Trump, in addition to the legal argument, there is a moral side to all this.  First of all, the return does illustrate his hypocrisy; he has made a point of criticizing others for similar things (why would anyone who is legitimately on welfare, or has legitimately taken advantage of another government program be any more guilty than Trump?).  On top of it, this is a story that will just play very poorly with independent voters and even his supporters, however he spins it.

3. Last but not least, this serves as an indicator and a red flag.  The fact that he did these financial maneuvers in 1995 begs the question what else has he done in subsequent years.  Just as Clinton is legitimately questioned about the Clinton Foundation ("pay for play"), Trump should clearly address whether his financials are putting him in a potentially compromising situation.  If he is not releasing his tax returns and financial info, then people should not trust him - plain and simple.

Nice summary.