David A. Fahrenthold, Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems. The Washington Post, 20 September 2016. “The Washington Post’s David A. Fahrenthold explains the latest revelations about how Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may have violated the IRS’s rules regarding charitable funds.”
September 10, 2016
How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money
David A. Fahrenthold, How Donald Trump retooled his charity to spend other people’s money. The Washington Post, 10 September 2016. “The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner. For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation. Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.”
December 29, 2015
For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions
Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen, For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions. The New York Times, 29 December 2015. Part of a series entitled Buying Power: “Articles in this series examine America’s growing concentration of wealth and its consequences for government and politics…. The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income…. With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.”