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Trump’s Tax Return Suggests He’s the Most Incompetent Billionaire in the Nation

by MelindaYali42 Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Tonight’s exciting news: David Cay Johnston somehow got hold of the first page of Donald Trump’s 2005 federal tax return. He released it on the Rachel Maddow show tonight:

Here are Trump’s major sources of income:

Interest income: $9 million
Business income: $42 million
Capital gains: $32 million
Rental income: $67 million
Miscellaneous: $2 million
Total: $152 million

After a writeoff of $103 million, his adjusted gross income clocked in at $49 million. His taxable income came in at $31 million and his tax bill for this was $5 million. That’s a tax rate of about 3 percent. Ka-ching!

Sadly for Trump, the Alternative Minimum Tax kicked in, which meant he had to pay $38 million in taxes. I guess it’s no wonder that Trump doesn’t think very highly of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Without more pages from his tax return, there’s a limit to what we can learn from this. Trump’s income of $150 million fits fairly well with the estimates I’ve seen. But I will add one thing.

Trump’s total investment income was $108 million, and Trump claims to be worth $5 billion or so, depending on what day you ask him. That means he earned a return on his assets of about 2 percent. In 2005! During the housing bubble! I’m no tax expert, and maybe he had hundreds of millions in capital gains that he didn’t realize that year. Who needs more than $150 million in income, after all? It still seems pretty low, though, and if Trump really did earn a return of only 2 percent he is, by long odds, the most incompetent billionaire in the country.

Alternatively, of course, Trump is actually worth about $1-2 billion and he earned something like a 5-10 percent return. Take your pick.

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Trump’s Tax Return Suggests He’s the Most Incompetent Billionaire in the Nation

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Here’s the Biggest Revelation From Donald Trump’s Leaked Tax Return

by YettaPreiss Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump earned $150 million and paid $38 million in taxes in 2005, according to the cover page of his tax returns from that year, which were leaked to reporter David Cay Johnston and highlighted on the Rachel Maddow Show Tuesday night. According to an analysis of the returns posted on Johnston’s website, Trump and his wife Melania paid just $5.3 million in income taxes, a rate of about 4 percent. The couple paid another $31 million in the alternative minimum tax.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump called for the elimination of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which is a tax designed to make sure that all taxpayers pay a certain amount even if they manage to reduce their tax liability. In his proposed tax policy, Trump would create just four tax brackets and do away with the AMT.

The White House preemptively announced the top-level tax numbers before Maddow’s broadcast and complained that the publication of Trump’s tax returns is illegal—which is not true.

Appearing on Maddow’s show, Johnston said the cover pages of Trump’s 2005 return were sent to him and he was unsure by whom. The fact that Trump paid little in the way of income taxes—he should have paid a rate of about 35 percent—is what is important, Johnston noted. If not for the AMT, Trump would have paid an extremely low rate.

“On $153 million, almost, of income, he would have paid a little over $5 million,” Johnston said, pointing out that would be a rate of less than 4 percent. Johnston said that rate is less than half of what the lowest tax rate is for Americans who make the least money.

Instead, Johnston said, Trump paid about 24 percent of his income in taxes, which is equivalent to the tax rate of a married couple who earn $400,000 a year.

“In 2005 Donald Trump and his wife made $418,000 a day,” Johnston said.

According to Johnston, Trump was able to claim a variety of deductions and listed a negative income of $103 million, which helped reduce his tax liability.

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Here’s the Biggest Revelation From Donald Trump’s Leaked Tax Return

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