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How Trump’s Tax Plan Would Benefit Trump

By John Cassidy

Donald Trump constantly spouts falsehoods. Sometimes he merely shades the truth outrageously. Other times he tells full-on whoppers. And that’s what he did in Indiana on Wednesday, when he said that the new Republican tax-reform plan “is not good for me.”

Trump hasn’t released his tax returns, of course, so it’s difficult to estimate precisely how much money he will save if his tax plan goes through. But since last summer, when Trump’s Presidential campaign released an initial version of his vision for tax reform, tax experts and journalists have been pointing to aspects of it that could benefit him greatly. Among others, the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley, NPR’s Jim Zarroli, and Slate’s Jordan Weissmann have investigated different ways that Trump stands to benefit. I’ll briefly try to explain each of the reform proposals that these reporters have previously looked at, and also mention one additional way that the tax plan could end up being a boon to the President’s businesses.

For starters, Trump would benefit from the abolition of the alternative minimum tax, which the Internal Revenue Service uses to insure that high-income people who have a lot of deductions and sheltered income contribute at least a minimum amount to the federal government. In 2005, the only tax year in the past couple of decades for which we’ve seen any of Trump’s filings—someone leaked two pages of his return to the financial journalist David Cay Johnston—he paid $38.4 million in federal taxes, and $31.3 million of that was to cover his A.M.T. liability.

Without the A.M.T., Trump’s tax bill that year, including self-employment taxes, would have been just $7.1 million. (This despite the fact that he grossed $152.7 million in business income, capital gains, salary, and interest.) Obviously, we can’t be absolutely sure that the A.M.T. has hit Trump in other years, or that it would hit him in the future. But, as a real-estate developer who can take advantage of many different deductions and loopholes in the tax code, he is exactly the type of taxpayer that the A.M.T. is designed to catch.

Another element of the G.O.P.’s tax plan that would benefit Trump is the proposal to tax so-called pass-through business income at a rate of twenty-five per cent. The White House is marketing this as a way to reduce the tax burden on small-business owners, who typically report their incomes on their personal tax returns. But it would also be a big gift to the owners of large private businesses, such as the Trump Organization, which are structured as investment partnerships, L.L.C.s, and S corporations. Just like mom-and-pop stores and restaurants, these much bigger firms “pass through” their income to their owners for tax purposes. At the moment, the I.R.S. treats this income like salary income, which means that anyone with taxable earnings of more than four hundred and forty thousand dollars a year pays the top rate of 39.6 per cent. But if the Trump tax plan goes into effect these high earners will see their tax rate reduced to twenty-five per cent—a huge reduction.

How can we be sure that Trump has a lot of pass-through income? Because he and his lawyers have said so. In March, 2016, Trump’s tax attorneys issued a disclosure letter that said, “you hold interests as the sole or principal owner in more than 500 separate entities. These entities are collectively referred to and do business as the Trump Organization . . . Because you operate these businesses almost exclusively through sole proprietorships and/or closely-held partnerships, your personal federal income tax returns are inordinately large and complex for an individual.” The letter didn’t reveal how much taxable income these companies generated. But in his 2005 tax return Trump said he had earned about $42.4 million in “business income,” and $67.4 million from “rental real estate, royalties, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, etc.” Clearly, these are substantial sums.

The third element of the tax plan that would benefit Trump (and his heirs) is the abolition of the estate tax. Trump has claimed to be worth at least ten billion dollars. Even if he is really only worth a tenth of that—a billion dollars—his estate would greatly exceed the threshold for getting hit by the estate tax, which is currently about $5.5 million. If Trump wanted to bequeath a billion dollars to his family members, they could theoretically face a federal-tax bill of up to four hundred million dollars. (The estate tax’s top rate is forty per cent.)

Of course, for people as rich and as tax-averse as Trump, there are ways to minimize, if not completely avoid, the estate tax—by, for example, setting up specialized trusts. In the country’s wealthiest Zip Codes, estate planning is a thriving industry. But the fact remains that some large fortunes are hit by hefty estate-tax duties, and Trump’s could conceivably end up being one of them. Abolishing the tax now would be a potential boon for his heirs, and for him.

An additional aspect of the tax plan that is favorable to Trump, and hasn’t received much attention, is its treatment—or non-treatment—of the aforementioned special benefits in the tax code that real-estate developers like the President enjoy. These range from unlimited deductions for interest payments on bank loans to generous treatment of losses on failed projects. On one line in his 2005 return, Trump reported “other income” of a deficit of a hundred and three million dollars. The statement explaining this loss wasn’t included in the few pages of the return that leaked, so we can’t be certain what its origin was. But tax experts cited by the Times speculated that it was a carryover from a huge loss of nine hundred and sixteen million dollars, which Trump reported on his 1995 return, and which Trump may have relied on for many years to minimize his tax bill or even wipe it out.

If the Trump Administration were serious about cleaning up the tax code and eliminating costly loopholes, the treatment of the real-estate industry would be an obvious place to start. But instead of tackling this issue head-on, the nine-page outline of the tax plan released this week speaks in generalities. “Special tax regimes exist to govern the tax treatment of certain industries and sectors,” it reads. “The framework will modernize these rules to ensure that the tax code better reflects economic reality and that such rules provide little opportunity for tax avoidance.” By the time the real-estate industry’s lobbyists have finished with the Republican-run committees on Capitol Hill that will actually write the tax legislation, this weak language is likely to be watered down to nothing. And if they have any trouble persuading lawmakers to preserve the favorable treatment of developers like Trump, they’ll know where to turn: the Oval Office.