The IRS is building a safe to keep President Donald Trump’s tax returns safe from the public eye.
Thus far, only two years of Trump’s taxes have been leaked to the public. The first was published by the New York Times in October of 2016, which showed that Trump incurred a $916 million loss in 1995. The Times claimed that as a result, Trump could’ve legally avoided paying any income taxes for up to 18 years, but that was proven false by another tax return that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow later revealed on the air.
Here’s why the liberal logic of Trump avoiding taxes was so wrong: If an investor loses $1 million in year one, and earns $1 million in year two as a result of his investments, how much money did he earn? The obvious answer is “zero,” which is why the government allows the carry-over of losses in prior years. For Trump, to truly have paid no taxes for nearly two decades, you’d have to believe that he earned an average of under $46 million a year ($916 million divided by 20). That’s unlikely for a billionaire, and Maddow proved it in March of this year.
In what was deemed the most anti-climatic episode of television since the opening of Al Capone’s vault, Maddow spent a solid 40 minutes outlining various conspiracies theories about Russia before revealing Trump’s 2005 tax return, showing, among other things, that Trump had paid $40 million in taxes that year. For some comparison, that came to an effective tax rate of 25 percent, while Barack Obama paid 19 percent.
By the looks of it, any future leaks are drastically less likely. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen sat down for an interview with Politico‘s Michael Gunwald, in which the following exchange transpired:
MG: You know I’ve got to ask: Are his taxes really being audited?
JK: I can’t tell you anything about anyone’s taxes, so you’ll have to go with whatever he says.
MG: You’re not going to give up his return?
JK: It’s in a locked cabinet in a locked room that nobody’s in. You’ll need a key to the room and the cabinet to get it. We’re in the process of turning that cabinet into a safe. We keep all the returns from every president in there.
MG: So have you looked at his return?
JK: I had no authority to look at anybody’s returns. Nobody can, unless you’re authorized for the process of examination. I couldn’t look at my own return. Anyone who looks at anyone’s return is subject to termination. We take this stuff seriously. Everyone’s aware of the history of the Nixon enemies list. No individual employee can even select a return for audit; we get automated referrals, and they go straight to a committee. But people need to be confident in that. Even with our limited resources, we’ll do a million audits this year. It’s so important that people don’t feel like they’re getting audited because they said something or gave to a certain organization.
Trump became the first presidential candidate in decades to not disclose his tax returns, which we imagine had been done in part to drive the media insane.
And we know reporters definitely won’t like that the IRS is keeping Trump’s tax returns locked up, away from prying eyes!
What do you think about Trump’s taxes being in an IRS safe? Will they be protected from people who want to damage the president? Tell us your thoughts below!
