WhatFinger


Line in the sand

Mr. President: Do not release your tax returns. Ever. Here's why:



The latest Democrat threat is that they will somehow stop all tax reform until President Trump releases his tax returns. This follows constant media carping during the election demanding that very same thing, only to have the demand rejected by Trump and, by extension, by the electorate. But wait, you say! Polls consistently show the public wants Trump to release his returns. Sure they do, and it's a classic example of what's called push polling. When a pollster asks a person if he thinks something would be a good idea, that doesn't necessarily mean the person was giving the matter any thought prior to being asked, or that it's particularly important to that person. If you asked 100 people, "Should snails be treated with dignity?" you could probably get at least 75 say yes, even though they had never before given the matter any thought and may never do so again.
They're not going to vote for or against candidates for office on the basis of their position on snail dignity, but put the thought in their head, sure, hey, sounds good, I'm all for it. If you ask the public whether a person in public life should release or otherwise be transparent about some aspect of their life - especially when it's the sort of thing others have been transparent about - they will almost always say yes. But that's not the same as really caring about it. Journalists are borderline obsessed with the release of Trump's tax returns. Normal people are not. Try this as an experiment: Approach 10 people and ask them if they think it was good that Barack Obama released his tax returns. When all 10 say yes, ask them what they remember about how much he made, how much he paid and what his tax rate was. How many of the 10 will recall any of these details? My guess would be zero. People like the idea that a politician would make such information available to the public, but they really don't have that much interest in the content of the information itself. There is also the objective matter of how we judge the information we find in one's tax return. Conventional media wisdom says that the higher the percentage of your income you pay in taxes, the more worthy you are of receiving votes. A good person, after all, would want to make sure that the government gets a significant chunk of his wealth so it can use that money to do the good things that only government can do.

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Trump should not have to endure a media firestorm because he spent decades earning a fortune and employing wise tax strategies

But that only makes sense if you're a left-winger who believes that everything good in society must originate with government. Anyone who has spent their life operating in the private sector understands that the availability of private capital is usually much more productive for its utility in building or expanding businesses, creating jobs, researching new products, upgrading facilities and so many other things. Political leftists and the journalists who act as their mouthpieces may think business people are greedy for wanting to pay less in taxes, but the rest of us understand that more capital circulating in the business community helps real people much more than anything a politician might do if given control of that same capital. So if President Trump releases his tax returns and they show that he found ways to minimize his tax liabilities even as he realized substantial earnings, the political class will howl that this is an injustice. Those of us who understand business and the accumulation of wealth will applaud him for a job well done and want to know how he did it, but our voices are not the ones driving the mainstream discussion. Trump should not have to endure a media firestorm because he spent decades earning a fortune and employing wise tax strategies. That's what everyone in business is taught to do. But if he released his tax returns, that is probably what would happen. But there is an even more basic reason he shouldn't release his returns: He is not required by law to do so, and he doesn't want to. Did anyone make Barack Obama go public with the balances in his bank accounts or investment accounts? Do we know how much George W. Bush has in his checking account? Not all personal financial information is deemed fair game for public consumption when someone runs for the presidency, but for some reason a person's tax returns are. Why? Is it because we judge the payment of taxes as a measure of a man's virtue and we need to see that he paid enough? Is it because the law requires the payment of taxes? That may be true, but why does that mean the public has a right to see the details of how he did it? The law requires you to buy auto insurance in most states, but the public doesn't have a right to see your policy.

What about a candidate's will?

What about a candidate's will? Why don't we have the right to know who he intends to leave his belongings to? Basically, because it's none of our damn business, just as it's none of our damn business what's in their tax returns. There's a reason the IRS is not allowed to just release a person's tax returns without the taxpayer's permission: It's private information. Trump is perfectly within his rights to keep that information private if he wants to, regardless of what other candidates before him have done. Obviously it would be important for the public to know if a candidate had dishonest or illegal financial dealings in their backrounds, but for the most part tax returns don't show you that. All they do is give voters and the media the opportunity to flyspeck and criticize legal maneuverings by people trying not to have the money they've earned confiscated from them. Conventional wisdom before 2016 was that no candidate could refuse to release his tax returns and win. Donald Trump exploded that bit of conventional wisdom as well as many others. It's a good thing that he did. And there is no reason he needs to give in after the fact by releasing them now. Future candidates may also decide not to release their returns, and based on the precedent Trump has set, they just might be able to exercise that discretion and still succeed. Trump's continued refusal to release his own can help to make that happen. The public really doesn't sit there and pore over candidates' tax returns, and the public wouldn't like it if their own tax returns were released. That's why the supposed public clamor for the release of Trump's returns is nothing more than the product of pollsters prompting the issue by the way they ask the question. Everyone knows Donald Trump is super rich, and that he got that way building hotels and casinos. Everyone can make up their own minds what they think about that, but seeing the detailed minutia of his tax returns won't add to any understanding of the man himself. Most people don't understand the contents of a tax return anyway. But they do understand when someone prefers to keep his financial matters private. Kudos to President Trump for sticking to his guns on this, whatever the reason. He's within his rights and the public really doesn't care. He should keep his tax returns private forever.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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