Demographic break down of America= 1 + 46.99999% + 53%
So Romney called the 47% of America that does not pay federal income taxes grifters, takers, free loaders etc.
Now Trump is calling the 53% of Americans who do pay federal income taxes dumb, not very smart, definitely not brilliant or genius.
So in the mind of Trump base, the 47% — 1 person are the freeloaders. Among the 47% which does not pay federal income taxes, 1 person is genius, brilliant, uses all legal means available to reduce tax burden to zero. The 53% who actually pay the taxes are, by inference, dumb.
Compared to the flak Hillary got for calling half of Trump’s supporters deplorable, Trump is getting a free pass for calling 53% of America dumb.
I am really angry at the way he used tax code to create paper losses on one hand to dodge taxes on real income on the other hand. What he did might be legal, but completely immoral. Unless he shows and proves that he actually lost 1 billion dollars that year, we should call it an accounting fiction used to dodge taxes. Some speculate he has created a fictitious loan that is parked in an opaque entity to create the loss. Others say he probably used accounting tricks like goodwill or naming rights to attach arbitrary values to intangibles, and wrote them off and claimed a loss.
Let me mention my story about these taxes and losses. In 2008 May I hit lottery. Well, not a real lottery, but I cashed some stock options. Not huge money, but substantial enough for me not to worry about retirement. If I played it right. And had the sense to conserve it till retirement. I invested in “a basket of diverse index fund ETFs that were contravariant with my core employment sector”, as the Schwab guy called it. Which you could guess was Technology. What was contravariant with Tech? Fincance! XLF!. You know what happened in Oct 2008. Among that carnage, got a sinking feeling that one chance I got in my life, I blew it. Then, genius C++ programmer me, who has no clue about taxes and losses and accounting, came up with a brilliant idea. If I sell all the things I bought using the cashing out of stock options, the losses would cancel the gains, I will actually have money to pay the tax bill! So I placed limit sell orders on these funds and sold them as they were racing to the bottom, with a serious 40% loss.
Come tax time, I learned that the stock option cashing was W2 dollars and the loss was Schedule D dollars and they can not be co-mingled! All I was allowed was a measly 3000$ to be set off. (Hillary too carried forward 700K in losses and set off the same 3000$ in her return in 2015!) Those losses expire in 8 years and eventually I harvested some gains last year and this year to finally finish them off.
And here I learn that by calling himself a real-estate-professional he was able to mix up the paper loss created by fictional entities with real income, declare a loss and avoid paying taxes for 1 billion dollars in income. And after that he has the gall to call himself brilliant genius and all the taxpayers dumb.
