A big reason for @realdonaldtrump’s low tax bills - a century of breaks for the real estate industry. Latest by me and @JamesStewartNYT: nytimes.com/2020/10/30/bus…
Trump has benefited from generous depreciation provisions in the tax code, which permits him and other real estate investors to get deductions for spending other people’s money, through massive borrowings.
Typically, if those borrowings stop getting repaid, the unpaid amount becomes taxable income immediately. But in 1993, Congress passed a law exempting real estate (although they did have to give up some future deductions).
Indeed, @realdonaldtrump availed himself of this very provision, avoiding a tax bill after his lenders canceled about $270 million of debt on a Chicago project: nytimes.com/2020/10/27/bus…
In 2018,@flitteronfraud and I reported that Mr. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner likely paid close to no federal income taxes for several years, largely because depreciation deductions generated tax losses for business that, in reality, were profitable: nytimes.com/2018/10/13/bus…
The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Mr. Trump's biggest legislative achievement, included a number of benefits for real estate. It also meant giving up some benefits, like the ability to fully deduct losses against certain types of income. But ....
...that tax break got restored in the Covid-19 stimulus legislation in March, part of a $174 billion package of tax breaks that will almost exclusively benefit the very wealthy and big companies: nytimes.com/2020/04/24/bus…
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