Much has been made about the Socialist Party demanding to be able to scrutinize President Trump’s tax returns over the past fifty years or whatever, and how Senior Socialist Pelosi isn’t able to rein in the demands of the AOC Wing of the Party. Whatever.
My take is simple: a private citizen’s tax information is an intensely confidential business — between the individual (or his agent) and the IRS, and no other.
Once an individual starts working in government, i.e. in public service, then his tax returns should be published in the Congressional Record each year, for two reasons:
- a position in public service should require that the public be able to scrutinize how it is possible for, say, ex-Senator Harry Reid (or current Speaker Pelosi, for that matter) to become a multi-millionaire while earning only a Congressional salary, and
- the knowledge that their financial dealings while in public service are being made public would make all gummint workers and elected officials more circumspect in their behavior, and rein in their corruption tendencies.
In other words, before someone starts working for the Gummint / is elected to office, those tax records are nunya. Once you become a public servant — and only then — those tax records should be subject to public scrutiny.
So if Trump tells Congress to FOAD when they demand to see his pre-presidential tax returns, I’ll support him to the hilt. But should Red Nancy refuse to let us see her tax returns from all the years she’s been in Congress, she should be impeached herself.
I thought we had this massive government three letter boondoggling organization intended specifically to review people’s tax returns every year.
The IRS, right?
And at least 8 of the last 10 tax years filed by Donald J Trump were available for the loving scrutiny of the Lerner/Obama fully operational enemy destroying tax battle-station , I mean IRS.
So what are these Congressional clowns; some of whom think tax credits are extant money, some of whom think islands can capsize, many of whom appear to think impeaching Trump will result in a Democratic President taking his place, what, do they think they’re going to find that the Obama weaponized IRS didn’t find?
My older brother, an old guy in his mid 80’s is an accountant who has specialized in Tax preparation since the late 1950’s, he has his own firm which was started by his partner in the 1930’s and he still prepares taxes for a few wealthy client families who that have been with the firm that long. My brother along with staff will spend up to two months working on a single families return, a lot of them are in oil & gas and some live in California as well as Texas and Oklahoma so there is a lot of research involved to pay as little as possible and remain totally legal and he has a reputation for never losing during an audit or dispute due to his diligence.
I gave the intro above because brother and I have had several conversations about those who would like to see Trump’s tax return and according to him, my brother, in order to make any sense at all out of the complicated returns of a person like Trump you would need to hire a tax expert with experience in all the states and countries where Trump has made and lost money and then spend several months auditing with research on specific laws during each year and that would take months and months. And yes, the IRS probably has had staff assigned to looking at Trump’s returns for years and years who talk to Trump’s accountants and tax lawyers regularly.
Us common folk would have no idea what the heck was going on and it would be easy to jump to conclusions about good tax avoidance vs. tax evasion. It is our duty to use every legal loophole to avoid paying any more tax than required and it is the IRS duty to catch and prosecute those who evade paying taxes owed.