(CNN)Now that Hillary Clinton has released her 2015 tax returns, and her running mate, Tim Kaine, has released a decade of his returns, the Twilight Zone that is Donald Trump"s tax return release position has gotten even more shadowy.
There are two key lessons in this.
For a start, Trump continues to assert that he will not, cannot or should not release his returns while they are under audit. This has always been a bad argument, legally and factually. But logic never quiets Trump and team. Indeed, Trump"s in-house legal adviser, Michael Cohen, has recently repeated the fallacies, claiming it would be "malpractice" to advise Trump to release his returns while they are being audited.
The impact of Trump"s tax plans on The Donald himself? We cannot tell, because we do not have his tax returns. What returns we do have, from the 1970s and 1980s (and a hint from the 1990s), show that Trump paid little to no taxes, taking advantage of tax breaks available to real estate dealers. Trump"s plan doesn"t appear to address any such breaks. Indeed, it lowers taxes especially on high earners -- which may or may not include Trump.
Trump does tout how he is closing the "carried interest" loophole that Wall Street hedge fund managers use to reduce their taxes, but it is not clear that their taxes will in fact go up at all. It is also not clear if any of this is relevant to Trump, personally.
So Trump may be a big winner under his tax plan -- perhaps because he pays little taxes now, and his plan would do nothing at all to change that happy (for him) fact. Regardless, the point -- for all of us -- is that we"ll never know. Apparently, it"s "none of our business" if Trump"s tax policy would benefit Trump himself.
Trump and his fellow Republicans like to lambaste Clinton for her alleged "pay-for-play" schemes. Is Donald Trump paying to become president so he can play trickle-down-tax-policy for himself and his family, to make the Trump brand rich again? If that sounds crazy, then Don"t-Disclose-Donald can prove it is indeed crazy by one simple step -- releasing his returns.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/12/opinions/clinton-trump-tax-plan-mccaffery/index.html
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