Clinton on Trump taxes
The Republican’s apparent admission came while Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was listing various reasons why Trump might be refusing to release his income taxes, something every presidential candidate of a major party as done in modern history. None of Trump’s income taxes have been released for 30 plus years.
The last time he released taxes in the early 80s he was forced to in order to get a casino license. Those returns revealed he did not pay taxes. Clinton speculated his recent returns would show the same thing.
Large-scale real-estate developers try to use loopholes in the tax system to avoid paying taxes and Trump has in the past boasted such avoidance is being a smart businessman.
When Clinton said he did not want to release his tax returns to the public because he was not paying federal taxes he interrupted her, which he did 51 times during the debate, but he did not do so to say “oh yes I did” but instead told her not paying taxes “makes me smart.”
She continued with the topic of Trump’s income taxes:
“So if he’s paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health,” Clinton said. “And I think probably he’s not all that enthusiastic about having the rest of our country see what the real reasons are, because it must be something really important, even terrible, that he’s trying to hide.”
Trump: squandered taxes
He did not interrupt her again on the subject. She continued and postulated he had not “…paid any federal income tax for a lot of years.” The crowd broke their promise of silence with applause and rather than interrupt to say he had paid taxes he interrupted to suggest he did not pay taxes because he did not like what the government would do with it.
“It would be squandered, too, believe me,” he said.
After the debate, Trump made an appearance in the ‘spin room’ (which was unprecedented, candidates previously have left the spin up to their surrogates) and Katy Tur of NBC asked three times if he paid federal taxes and once he failed to provide a coherent answer while twice he did not answer at all.
Trump has suggested before that avoiding taxes was okay because, in his view, government wastes the money.
