Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders praised Donald Trump on Tuesday for educating Americans about “a tax system which is extraordinarily unfair.”
Speaking at a Hillary Clinton campaign event in New Hampshire, Sanders laid into Trump about how the presidential candidate dodged paying federal income taxes.
“When we talk about the economy and talked about a rigged economy and I’ve been running all over this country for the last year and a half, I talked about a tax system which is extraordinarily unfair,” Sanders explained to the crowd at Plymouth State University. “Yet, in one day, one day, Donald Trump did more to educate the American people about the unfairness and the absurdity of our tax system than I did in a year and a half.”
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According to the New York Times, Trump avoided paying potentially hundreds of millions in taxes in a “legally dubious” maneuver.
The newspaper said the maneuver may also explain how Trump posted a one-year loss of more than $900 million a few years later, enabling him to avoid paying federal income taxes for perhaps 18 years.
At issue is how Trump was able to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars of debt as his casino empire in Atlantic City went broke in the early 1990s. Cancelled debt generally is treated as taxable income, meaning Trump would have owed the Internal Revenue Service significant money on debt that his creditors forgave.
“What Trump said was ‘Hey, I am a multi-billionaire. I have mansions all over the world. I live in the lap of luxury and I, a multi-billionaire, and my fellow multi-billionaires, we don’t have to pay any federal income tax because the middle-class and the working-class of this country do,’” Sanders mocked Trump as saying. “So, we got some bad news for Mr. Trump. That is not only is he going to lose on Nov. 8 but he and his billionaire friends are going to start paying their fair share of taxes.”
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In October, Trump had said paying no income tax would make him “smart” and that he had “brilliantly used” the tax rules to his advantage.
–With a file from the Associated Press
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