when tim kaine kept hammering pence about donald trump s tax returns, it wasn t just about the tax returns. america has never in its history elevated someone to its highest office with less public service experience than donald trump. but trump, of course, does have a long business career, which is american public might be able to accurately judge as the entirety of his resume if he d release his tax returns. the new york times revelation on trump s decades old tax return did shed some light on the subject. he declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years. trump first responded to that news by saying he had brilliantly used the tax laws to his benefit. mike pence echoed that last night. it s actually the fault of wait for it hillary clinton. she complains about how i have used the tax laws of this country to may benefit.
he declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years. trump first responded to that news by saying he had brilliantly used the tax laws to his benefit. mike pence echoed that last night. it s actually the fault of wait for it hillary clinton. she complains about how i have used the tax laws of this country to may benefit. then i ask a simple question. why didn t she ever try to change those laws so i couldn t use them? you know why? she could have changed the laws when she was in the united states senate, but she didn t. but, as noted by our next guest, it just so happens there was an egregious tax loophole in the 1990s created by accident which was closed by the job creation and workers assistance act of 2002 a bill that then senator hillary clinton voted
how do you lose that much money? people haven t quite grasped how big this loss is. obviously $916 million is an enormous amount of money. but the provision he took, the net operating loss. when your business has losses that exceed all your income, you have a negative income. when you look at all the tax returns in the entire country in 1995, there was about $49 billion of that which means donald trump accounted for 2% of the net operating loss in the entire country. of the entire gdp of the u.s. right. all the different firms and places that are operating. it s just individual income tax, but yeah, anyone who has a business like trump s that s owned as an individual company. did he really have $900 million of his own to lose in these businesses that we know did do very badly, in fact, in the early 1990s, his casinos, his airlines. he had three casino bankruptcies. so he did lose a lot of money,
for and president george w. bush signed and it s entirely possible that is the exact tax loophole donald trump may have used if he did indeed manage to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades. joining me the man who wrote about that tax loophole today, josh barro. we should note we re speaking in the hypothetical because we don t actually know. we don t know. we ve only seen the first page of this tax return. if we d have seen the whole return, we could talk more concretely about what s in it. how do you lose that much money? people haven t quite grasped how big this loss is. obviously $916 million is an enormous amount of money. but the provision he took, the net operating loss. when your business has losses that exceed all your income, you have a negative income. when you look at all the tax returns in the entire country in 1995, there was about $49 billion of that which means donald trump accounted for 2% of the net operating loss in the entire country. of the entire gdp o
and then there is also the fact that we don t actually have any proof at all that there is an audit going on. it s something donald trump just says. what is your reaction to that generally, the notion of a presidential candidate saying i can t release it because it s under audit, and then never even giving us the audit letter from the irs, never even proving there is an audit. well, i can t comment on whether or not he is having an audit because i have no knowledge. but clearly, there is no reason not to be able to release the return. david cay johnston has a question, mr. mitnick. david? the net operating loss number, the $916 million that you had to do using your selectrik typewriter, that s just a cumulative figure? right? largely came from prior years and there were many years when there would be nols? without the supporting schedules and the prior returns,