During the first presidential debate in September, Donald Trump bragged about paying no taxes.
CLINTON: … maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax.
TRUMP: That makes me smart.
And research shows that he also paid no taxes in several other years. In between the two debates, the New York Times received an envelop stuffed with part of Trump’s 1995 return, and that return indicated Trump could have used losses he reported that year along with loopholes available to real estate developers, to dodge taxes for decades.
CLINTON: ... since the Great Recession, the gains have all gone to the top. And we need to reverse that.
People like Donald, who paid zero in taxes, zero for our vets, zero for our military, zero for health and education, that is wrong.
COOPER: Mr. Trump ... The New York Times published three pages of your 1995 tax returns. They show you claimed a $916 million loss, which means you could have avoided paying personal federal income taxes for years. You’ve said you pay state taxes, employee taxes, real estate taxes, property taxes. You have not answered, though, a simple question. Did you use that $916 million loss to avoid paying personal federal income taxes for years?
TRUMP: Of course I do. Of course I do.
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Trump followed up with an excuse that he returned to on several points: Other people do it.
TRUMP: And so do all of her donors, or most of her donors. I know many of her donors. Her donors took massive tax write-offs.
Conveniently, he didn’t point to Hillary’s taxes. Her taxes are not only public, they show that the Clintons paid their fair share.
The Clintons pulled in $10.6 million in 2015... Their tax return showed that they paid $3.24 million in federal income taxes. That means their effective tax rate -- a measure of their income tax burden -- was 30.6% based on their adjusted gross income. That's on par with their 32% effective rate in 2014.
Donald Trump? 0%. Again, and again, year after year, from the 1970s on.
Trump is so “smart” that he fits the statement Hillary had perfectly—paying not a dime in income taxes to support the nation since at least the early 1990s.