Hacker News Reader

Comment by tertiary | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, President Trump payed $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. I just looked it up and I, a graduate student who makes like $30k a year paid three times that amount last year.

View on HN

Warren Buffett is in a similar boat and has complained vocally about it. The US tax system is absurd when it comes to the upper echelon.

[Edit: I mean, he's complained that it's unjust and that billionaires like him should be paying their fair share.]

Warren Buffett is in an entirely dissimilar boat, because Warren Buffett does not have enormous losses to carry forward, and therefore actually pays significant personal income tax ($1.8 million on personal income of $11.5 million in 2015).

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161010005859/en/Tax...

I meant that he pays well below what you or I pay. He's in a lower tax bracket than his secretary. $1.8M on $11.5M is what? Something in the ballpark of 15%? He should be in the highest tax bracket. That's my point. The tax laws favor the wealthy, and they shouldn't.

That's a completely unrelated and distracting issue.

Trump paid $750 total, which is not 15% of anything. He could have easily paid $0, as he did before becoming POTUS. His team picked a tiny number above zero starting in 2016 when he was elected. This is completely and totally unrelated to the capital gains tax rate.

It's not unrelated. My point is that the wealthy have a whole lot of loopholes when it comes to taxes, and we ought to address that.

Almost certainly, Trump used these loopholes to minimize his taxes. I assume in his case, he had a lot of losses that he was able to use to bring his over all income down well below what you or I report in a given year.

Unless Trump did something illegal (entirely possible), my point is related and not distracting.

Where is the Alternative Minimum Tax? You know, that tax law that pops up frequently for high earners in the tech field when they have more deductions than seems fair? Why isn't Trump subject to the same minimum taxation that I would be?

The AMT isn’t a hard minimum on federal taxes. It is a different set of rules for what incomes and deductions count towards the “income” figure AMT is calculated against. There are ways to pay less than AMT, legally, and this is a purposeful choice in its design. There are still certain adjustments allowed. See https://www.thebalance.com/alternative-minimum-tax-3192753

Apparently my factual comment above deserved downvotes. Here is evidence of how Trump was able to legally reduce his taxes below AMT (carry forward): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/trump-750-taxes.html

I should have kept reading: Mr. Trump paid alternative minimum tax in seven years between 2000 and 2017 — a total of $24.3 million, excluding refunds he received after filing. For 2015, he paid $641,931, his first payment of any federal income tax since 2010.

So basically, the big headline "$750 in income tax" claim that's been repeated everywhere else and gone viral on social media is technically true but also massively misleading to the tune of millions of dollars? Guess that figures for media coverage of anything remotely involving Trump in 2020. Also, this Reuters piece is terrible at the time of writing my reply: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trump-taxes-idUKKBN26J... It makes it sound like the New York Times piece contradicts his claim to have paid many millions of dollars in taxes, when it actually seems to confirm it - but that detail is buried, obfuscated, and omitted from most of the coverage elsewhere of the NYT's reporting.

It looks like Trump has paid millions in taxes at some times but also has more than $1 billion in losses that have offset almost all of his taxes for decades. My takeaway is that he has been able to rake in huge amounts of money (like $200 million+ from the Apprentice) but he then pours it into businesses that appear to lose money on paper. He lives his life on the back on these businesses so his lifestyle is almost 100% deductible. He's found away to keep spending an extra 20% to 30% by avoiding income tax. However, he's also spending like a drunken sailor and currently has more than $400 million in loans due in just a few years with personal guarantees.

I live outside the US, but I'm forced to pay US tax on some minimal income, I pay more that than Trump does

The problem here is that American culture has made you entitled. You think that, just because you can get into grad school and bump shoulders with the elite, you should be able to deduct $70,000 of haircuts, too.

(This is a joke, to be clear.)

All his properties are in corporations or limited liabilities, like almost every other business in the country. Those corporations do pay taxes. His securities, investments, etc. are in a trust, required by law, I believe, which would also pay taxes separately.

He donates to charity 100% of his US government salary. I'm wondering how he even owed $750 on federal taxes.

This is wrong on many, many, many points. Please, read the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com