Trump claimed a hundreds-of-million dollar loss in 95 and that's bad somehow

https://archive.is/CW13D
Trump lost almost a billion dollars due to a tanked early-nineties economy being utterly horrible for his business. So he declared his loss on his tax form in order to mitigate the effects of that loss...taking advantage of a new set of tax laws that were written (partially) and pushed by...then-president Bill Clinton.

And apparently he had a fiduciary obligation to do so? Or according to dailykos (not exactly a trustworthy source especially being an "opinion" column) he actually didn't?

Why are people angry??

Can someone explain this to me? Maybe someone with a liberal-slant and experience with tax law who is on this website :wink:

It's not even economic, he's exercising a very powerful loophole that everyone complains about. When you hear companies, or 1%'ers don't pay 'enough taxes' this is why, he made about 7.5 million with AMT that's at a 35% rate of around 2.5m he should be paying in taxes.

Unfortunately all I see is 3 pages which is basically the post calculated but, he filed a Schedule E which is most likely reflecting k1 statements or even real estate property. Pretty much the shares in his company/property depreciated which led to these huge losses, however keep in mind even though a building for example has depreciated, like say 1.2m and you can write off the depreciation, the building is still worth 650m. It's a legit deduction but when you have massive investments like trump, especially in companies, those depreciation add up, it's essentially GOOD debt.

The loss also could be he sold some type of tangible property and took the loss on it, he would only have to pay the Fair market value vs what he sold, rather than the initial purchase. (For example you buy a car for 20k, it's pushed forward to your kids, its a classic, it's worth like, 60k, you sell it for 55k, that's a loss of 5k rather than a gain of 40k). Now thnk of a piece of land that's up in the millions and you can see realistically where these numbers come from.

I think it's unfair to say 'trump is avoiding paying taxes!" he's exercising the tax laws to his favor, and they aren't like, questionable grey area, these laws were designed for this. Tax laws honestly reward you for putting everything off as soon as possible, specifically assets, it's gotten so bad that they had to do the death tax to start to balance it all out