Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible.

Its a powerful tension knowing you should wait 36 hours versus seeing what a massive reliance there is on innumeracy, ignorance, non sequiturs, and category errors.  

The NYT has finally published President Trump's tax returns of the past ten or fifteen years.  Like Maddow's triumphant publication of his 2005 return only to discover that there was no there there, the NYT revelation appears so far to be an equally damp squib.

During Obama's administration there was a fringe group obsessed with the idea that Obama was foreign born and not eligible for the Presidency.  Always a fringe belief but it seemed, after a while, as if Obama benefited by allowing the nonsense to drivel on.  Once anybody of any credibility moved past it, and the mockery of knuckle draggers had played out, the birth certificate was finally produced.  Much ado about nothing.

It feels like much the same dynamic now.  Like the birthers, the NYT and DNC have been desperate to get their hands on Trump's tax returns.  It would prove he was a swindler, in the pay of the Russians, that he was a con artist, etc.

Well . . . .  About that.

The tax returns are out there in the open and so far it seems like the factual headlines are:

Trump Taxes On Display - Millions in taxes paid, no evidence of Russian relationship discovered.

A subheading might be.

Big losses from some ventures offset by gains in others.

That's not how it is being spun and perhaps with real experts digging, something will turn up.

But for the time being, those True Believers desperate to find the exposé among the tax returns which would sink him seem as much taken aback as were the Obama birthers.  So far there is no there there.  

So much so, that the usual Mandarin Class talking heads are immediately in misleading territory.  Trying to elide tax avoidance (legal) with tax evasion (illegal).  Just as Senator Blumenthal was trying the other day to claim the Barrett's nomination was unconstitutional and illegal when it is entirely constitutional, legal, and consistent with recent nominations and with plenty of precedence.

If your only argument is to lie, the quality of debate is going to be low.

Other sources of confusion to commenters which I have so far seen include:

Federal taxes vs. State taxes

Corporate taxes vs.  Personal taxes

Tax avoidance vs. Tax evasion 

Revenue vs. Profits (I kid you not)

Assets vs. income (I kid you not)

Compliance with the tax code vs. Tax cheating

Corporate asset management vs. wage incomes 

Income statements vs. Balance sheets 

So far, it sounds like Trump was compliant with the tax code and paid all the taxes he was obligated to pay.  It is long and well established that the tax code has some real short-comings as a means for managing national policy.  Among the principal drawbacks is that governance is obfuscated, it is an invitation to lard the code with dubious requirements, and unintended consequences proliferate because the tax code writers are never as clever or well rewarded as those paid to comply self-beneficially with all the loopholes of the code.

For example, there is an argument to be made that capital investment (which can drive economic growth) should be treated preferentially over wage income.  Not only is there such an argument, it is in fact our national policy with bipartisan support for many decades.  Which is one reason corporate taxes can look so different and inconsequential compared to income tax rates.  Just ask any Silicon Valley titan or unicorn upshot.  How many years before Amazon's growth in valuation spilled over into actual corporate profitability or material income tax reporting for Bezos?

If the objective was to force everyone to pay some minimal level of tax, that has long been within the purview of Congress.  They wrote the rules and so far, Trump and his team seem to have complied with them.  Perhaps not in the way his critics would have wished, but complied none-the-less.

A lawyer tweeted 

Federal income taxes paid in 2017 (jointly with spouse):

Joe Biden - $3,742,974

Kamala Harris - $516,469

Bernie Sanders - $343,882

Elizabeth Warren - $268,484

Donald Trump - $750

The implied argument was that the first four were being ethical and financially successful and the fifth, Trump was not.  But there is an alternate way to interpret that data.  How come three career politicians and an academic are earning so much income that they have to pay so much tax?  Chase that rabbit for a while and you arrive at some interesting insights which are not supportive of the lawyer's argument.  And that doesn't even begin to address that income is not wealth.

All this is prompted by Althouse's very pertinent blog post, Why didn't Joe Biden work on changing the tax laws in all those decades in Congress? He's responsible for the system that Trump, as a private citizen, was forced to operate within.  Biden, Warren, Haris, Sanders, et al, Senators all, are complaining about the tax rules which they set.  Is this a Trump issue or a BWHS/DNC issue?  Sure seems, if Trump is in compliance, then BWHS and DNC have no one to blame but themselves.

We'll see.  36 hours haven't yet passed.  

And it is worthwhile recalling, as many on the left have not, the words of Learned Hand, among our greatest legal minds of the past century.  

Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one's affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.

Commissioner v. Newman, 159 F2d 848 (1947).

If one accepts that as true, as I suspect most would, and if it ends up being the case that Trump was in compliance with tax law, then all the critical chatter will serve as a tribute to the cleverness of Trump's lawyers and tax planners in both adhering to the law while minimizing the tax consequences to his business dealings.   

UPDATE:  Making broadly the same points but in far more entertaining prose, NO, YOU IDIOTS. THAT’S NOT HOW TAXES WORK. – AN ACCOUNTANT’S GUIDE TO WHY YOU ARE A GULLIBLE MORON by Larry Correia.

I posted that last night on Facebook, and sure enough, this morning my feed is filled with people who don’t know shit about taxes retweeting the stupid opinions of other morons who also don’t know shit about taxes. This is just as annoying as last week when these same idiots all suddenly became Constitutional Scholars. Or the month before that when they were all experts on use of force laws and police tactics. Or the month before that when they suddenly got their epidemiology degrees from the University of Internet and turned into infectious disease experts.  

Holy shit, you Dunning-Krugerands are annoying. Of course the comments are all about the “morality” of paying your “fair share”. Which isn’t how any of this works in real life. Just stop it with your vapid hot takes already. You clearly have a child-like grasp of a complex topic, and your words are making America dumber. 

As a former accountant, please allow me to explain why all of today’s newly formed tax experts are fucking morons, and we should metaphorically put a brick in a sock and beat them over the head with it until they shut up.

[snip]

One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is that it is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddling makes it more costly to conduct business. The more complicated the regulatory burden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicated enough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can afford to pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremely well, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, filling out government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probably ever read)

Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full of accountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patch and a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and an accounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to take advantage of every tax break in the US Code for his client, and do so gleefully, knowing that many of those laws were signed by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire and brimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditor bereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve a legion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the Trump Corporation’s P&L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits a turd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay. 

[snip]

That’s how it works. On one side CPAs, and the other, hellspawn audit demons, and they’ll argue, and battle, and go to court over what is and is not owed to the government, and then the client will pay what is legally owed plus any applicable fines and penalties (and not a dime more). Both sides of this titanic eternal struggle are far smarter than anyone at the New York Times and they have access to the actual financial data, unlike all the blue check mark idiots on Twitter who are whinging on today about their feelings. Barf.

Your feelings don’t mean shit. Same as the rest of us, Trump owes what he owes. And the IRS will determine if that number is accurate or not.