Free Allegiance Forums

cashto wrote:QUOTE (cashto @ Oct 5 2016, 12:35 AM) Not really.

Not sure how much you know about our (very complicated) tax system, but there are essentially two types of income that we report: ordinary income (wages, rents, business income, some other types), which is taxed at a progressive scale which tops out at around 40%, and capital gains (investment income), which is taxed at varying rates depending on type, but always lower than ordinary income, and normally 15% for investments held longer than one year (long term capital gains).

Trump's loss was taken as a loss on ordinary income (business revenue), so he can carry those losses forward for any kind of income. Clinton's loss was a long-term capital gains loss, which can offset any future long-term capital gains, but only $3,000 per year can be applied to ordinary income. As a result, Clinton has been paying an effective rate of 25-35% every year, whereas Trump has probably paid an effect rate of 0% for up to 18 years or however long it took to recoup those losses.

As the NYT article discusses, there is nothing inherently shady about applying past losses to future income. It's been a cornerstone of our tax system for a very long time actually: if you lose $100k in the first 6 months and then gain $100k for the next 6 months, then your income for the year is $0 and you pay no tax -- so why should it be any different if you lose $100k for one year and make $100k the next? The IRS understands that for businesses, they can have cycles longer than a year.

It's the scale of the writeoff -- four orders of magnitude larger than Clinton's, and 2% of all business losses for all taxpayers in that year -- which makes this such a big story (esp. in light of Trump's supposed business acumen).