This was 40 years ago. Imagine what he's done in the meantime.
The last time information from Donald Trump’s income-tax returns was made public, the bottom line was striking: He had paid the federal government $0 in income taxes.
The disclosure, in a 1981 report by New Jersey gambling regulators, revealed that the wealthy Manhattan investor had for at least two years in the late 1970s taken advantage of a tax-code provision popular with developers that allowed him to report negative income.
Yes, even back then Donald Trump was even then allegedly filthy rich, but he didn't have to pay any income tax because he sucked as a businessman and didn't actually earn anything. That's the story and he'll stick with it!
Back in our own decade, however, I see that the public wisdom is beginning to coalesce around what many of us have been saying for a while: Trump's likely hiding his taxes because they'd show he's not worth ten billionty dollars, or anything even close to it.
Bob McIntyre of the liberal group Citizens for Tax Justice suspects Trump’s tax returns, if made public, would undermine the political image the candidate has crafted of a brilliant businessman with what his campaign has called “tremendous cash flow.”
Trump may be worried that “he’d show very little income on his tax returns compared to his wealth claims,” McIntyre said, adding that Trump’s returns could also show that he “writes off everything he has in his life — the hairdo, the plane — as business expenses.”
It could be both, of course. He could be both not as rich as he claims he is and crooked. But Donald Trump really hasn't had a problem pooh-poohing revelations of his sketchy business dealings in debates and on the campaign trail, while questions about the size of his [anything] reliably infuriate him, so it's likely that if his tax returns merely proved him to be a tax cheat he wouldn't be quite so insistent on keeping them private.