What We Can Do About Trump's Tax Returns
The Great Recession was a time of hardship for millions of Americans experiencing lost jobs, stolen homes, and mass suffering. But when Donald Trump thinks back to this terrible time in American history, his eyes must light up. Government measures taken to speed recovery earned him hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits.
A good chunk of that is the subject of a fierce IRS audit right now. But you’re right to wonder why the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly known as the stimulus package), intended to pull the nation’s unemployed and underemployed back into the workforce, managed to bestow so much benefit on a failed businessman who played a tycoon on TV.
The answer goes beyond the Recovery Act. The U.S. tax code has been mangled in bipartisan fashion to serve the powerful. If members of Congress ever managed to separate themselves from their paymasters, they could easily fix this, and end the serial cheating of which Trump is only the most aggressive avatar. That ought to be the primary response to this bombshell.
Let’s look at those Recovery Act provisions. The first is known as the cancellation of debt income (CODI) rule. It was designed to encourage businesses to restructure debts without taking a tax hit. Canceled debt that often is a by-product of such restructuring is usually treated as income, but under the CODI rule, that income would be deferred for five years, and then spread out over the next five.
Read more: https://prospect.org/economy/what-we-can-do-about-trumps-tax-returns/
(American Prospect)
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