The New York Times Paid No Taxes in 2014
Dan Flynn
by
Joel B. Pollak 2 Oct 2016
The New York Times has excited the Clinton campaign and the rest of the media with a
revelation that Republican nominee
Donald Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 that might have
resulted in him not paying taxes in some subsequent years.
The implication, reinforced by CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union on Sunday morning, is that Trump
“avoided” paying taxes, when in fact his tax liability was zero.
As Forbes
noted at the time:
…
for tax year 2014, The New York Times paid no taxes and got an income
tax refund of $3.5 million even though
they had a pre-tax profit of $29.9 million in 2014. In other words,
their post-tax profit was higher than their pre-tax profit. The
explanation in their
2014 annual report is,
“The effective tax rate for 2014 was favorably affected by
approximately $21.1 million for the reversal of reserves for uncertain
tax positions due to the lapse of applicable statutes of limitations.”
If you don’t think it took fancy accountants and tax lawyers to make
that happen, read the statement again.
New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani
defended Trump on Sunday, telling NBC News’ Meet the Press that Trump was a “genius” in business who was simply doing what the tax code allows every American to
do by counting losses against tax liabilities, and bouncing back from failure to success.
That would include the New York Times — which, however, is still struggling.
As Jazz Shaw of HotAir.com notes,
the Times — or whoever was its source — likely obtained Trump’s tax document illegally.
The
ongoing IRS scandal, in which the federal government targeted
conservative organizations, involved several
cases in which the agency illegally shared taxpayer information with
other branches of government, and in one case leaked taxpayer
information to a conservative organization’s political opponents.
In 2008, the confidential tax information of Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, who emerged as a critic of then-Sen.
Barack Obama, was
leaked illegally by an Ohio state official.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See
No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at
@joelpollak.
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