US Politics in Trump era
The Senate Starts to Look at Trump’s Businesses
Adam Davidson writes that a Senate panel’s request for information from a Treasury enforcement unit suggests a broader scope to its investigation. The FinCEN request is particularly interesting because the unit enforces money-laundering laws and is familiar with Donald Trump’s holdings, specifically the Taj Mahal casino, in Atlantic City. Trump opened the Taj Mahal in 1990. He sold half of his shares in 2004, as part of a bankruptcy settlement, but remained a minority owner. In 2015, the Taj Mahal admitted to “willfully” violating the law by letting many suspicious transactions go unreported to the authorities, and agreed to pay a ten-million-dollar fine—one of the largest ever for a casino.
Federal Debt Projected to Grow by Nearly $10 Trillion Over Next Decade
After seven years of fitful declines, the federal budget deficit is projected to begin swelling again, adding nearly $10 trillion to the federal debt over the next 10 years, according to projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that reveal the strain that government debt will have on the economy as President Trump embarks on plans to slash taxes and ramp up spending.
To Those Defending Trump’s Tax Evasion Because it ‘Was Legal’: You’re Missing the Damn Point
Whatever is actually in Trump’s tax returns is worse than what the New York Times says
Trump Used the Same Tax Breaks as Amazon to Drastically Reduce His Own IRS Bill
President Donald Trump complains that large corporations, such as Amazon.com Inc., are shirking their tax responsibilities. Yet for at least a decade, Trump paid none or very little in federal income taxes by exploiting some of the same generous tax breaks that the online retail giant and others have used to reduce IRS bills.
After meeting with pharma lobbyists, Trump drops promise to negotiate drug prices
A lot happened in the 2016 campaign, but one of the things Donald Trump did to win the election was shift to the left on a number of key issues — promising to avoid cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits and adopting a longstanding Democratic pledge to let Medicare negotiate bulk discounts in the price it pays for prescription drugs.
House panel votes against requesting Trump’s tax returns
Trump Tax Records Obtained by The Times Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades
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.Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said tax rules that are especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.
Decade in the Red: Trump Tax Figures Show Over $1 Billion in Business Losses
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
Trump’s Taxes Show Chronic Losses and Years of Income Tax Avoidance
Deutsche Bank Might Have Destroyed Physical Copies of Trump’s Tax Returns, Cleansed Servers, Claims Former Executive
A former Deutsche Bank executive who reviewed President Donald Trump's tax returns reportedly said it is "not normal" that the institution no longer holds copies of those records.Trump for many years relied on Deutsche Bank for loans to sustain his real estate business when many other institutions would not lend to him because of his rocky financial history.The president is accused by some, including his former attorney Michael Cohen, of manipulating the value of his assets to either secure finance or reduce his tax bill.