OPINION

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Already in plain sight

Add Donald Trump's income tax returns to the list of things that don't matter and on which congressional Democrats waste time.

Columnist George Will has said it: Trump lies exposed in plain sight already.

The preposterous second-place and Russian-endorsed president won't release his income-tax returns because he doesn't have to and doesn't want to.

He won't release them because they would show him to be much less than the man and mogul he claims to be.

They show that he never made nearly as much money as he asserts. They show that his lawyers and accountants have availed themselves of the law--or of their assertion of the law's application to Trump in checkered endeavors--to leave Trump paying next to nothing in federal income taxes.

The New York Times has produced an epic investigative report already revealing Trump's real finances and giving the lie to his claims of being self-made.

Trump's base doesn't care. The rest of us care but see him clearly already for the fraud that he is.

If I have any of these particulars wrong, Trump is welcome to prove it by releasing his income-tax returns for recent years--10, maybe, to start.

He won't, because, as Will says, he is revealed in plain sight already.

It's nice that major-party presidential nominees of the post-Watergate era--except Gerald Ford in 1976 and Trump this last time--have voluntarily released varying quantities of personal income-tax returns as a concession to greater transparency and accountability.

But it's no law. And these public returns generally haven't amounted to much in the way of valuable, much less influential, information.

They show big numbers. They show book royalties, capital gains, charitable contributions and effective tax rates on high incomes that are less than the effective tax rates of middle-class wage-earners.

Those effective rates are less at the presidential-candidate level because of the tax laws rather than any impropriety on the parts of the candidates. Were that otherwise, those candidates would have done as Trump has done and stonewalled.

In 2012, an uncommonly wealthy investments businessman, Mitt Romney, was the Republican candidate for president. He released returns showing an effective tax rate between 13 and 14 percent, less than the tax rate on standard wages at, say, $100,000.

That was because his net taxable income was heavy with depreciation calculations and capital gains taxed at lower rates than standard income. In fact, he didn't report all his charitable contributions because he had said publicly that he always paid at least 13 percent, but, in one year, he'd have paid between 10 and 11 percent if he'd taken all his charitable deductions.

His returns had value for a few days as political rhetoric and commentary fodder, but, in the end, mattered not at all. Romney had not done anything improper. He had paid a legally lower rate than working people, in defiance of the concept of progressive income taxation. But, then, his Republican base embraced the notion of tax breaks for the rich and resented the fact that really poor people don't pay any income taxes at all.

What it came down to was that Romney released what might have seemed controversial returns, yet, in no time at all, those returns settled into, and even cooked out of, the contemporary American political stew.

Democrats will demand Trump's returns. He will defy them. The issue might go to court--even the U.S. Supreme Court--and hinge not on any legal obligation for him to release them, because there isn't any, but on the extent of congressional subpoena power.

The effect of his not releasing them will be the same as the effect of his releasing them and their showing him to be the fraud that he already is known to be. That effect would be none.

Either way, the news would settle into and eventually cook right out of the contemporary American political stew.

As always, my refrain remains the same. Democrats will not beat Trump by obsessing on revealing him as the bogus blowhard everyone already knows him to be. They will beat him only with a better candidate, one not yet evident.

At present, their best shot still might the ancient child of the 1970s who, so far as we know, has grabbed 'em only by the shoulders or the head.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 04/10/2019

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