Taxes Redux Redux Redux

I had to laugh yesterday morning.

My older son Eric was visiting over the weekend with his girlfriend, so there was not a lot of news-watching going on the past few days.  The TV was dominated with hockey, of which my son and I are both big fans.  Fortunately we cheer on the same team, which makes hockey different from the other sports, where we don't exactly agree on rooting interest.

But I digress.

Without news on TV, we were not aware that there had apparently been some street protests in various parts of the country over the weekend.  Oddly, they were not about the imminent threat from North Korea and their CFKIC, or "crazy fat kid in charge" (yes, in my column I can body-shame North Korean nut cases).

They weren't about the 50,000 black children murdered each year before being born either, or the 2,000 black people murdered in Chicago each year who had been born.  They weren't about ISIS, which continues to murder people in the Middle East, Europe and the USA.  No, those causes were apparently secondary, tertiary and quaternary in importance relative to something far more important to the protestors.

Yes, it was President Donald Trump's tax returns.

The amusing repartee of the morning was between actress (and, therefore, "expert") Debra Messing, famous for the "Will and Grace" TV show of many years back, and Morgan Radford, who talks into a microphone for MSNBC.

Miss Messing was going on and on and on and on about how important it was that the president release his tax returns just like all the other presidents and candidates had.  And I suppose there is reason to ask, at least, about them, except for about a dozen reasons, beginning with the fact that the public, led by the tax expert Debra Messing, wouldn't know what to do with a 1040 if it bit us each on our gluteus maximus.

You see, in the interview itself, she spent a lot of the time talking about President Trump's supposed ties to Russia and what a bad thing that was, although what those ties might actually be, she didn't say.  The logical inference was that those "ties" must have led the Russians to interfere with the 2016 election, although there still has not been a scintilla of evidence that anything they may have done had even one vote's worth of effect.  (Aside to Miss Messing: Hillary lost.  Get over it.)

And she then went on to assert that only by the president releasing his taxes would the public know what those ties were.  You see, he has "business interests in Russia", she said, and we desperately had to know what those are, lest ... I don't know what.  If the Russians had actually contributed to Hillary Clinton's defeat in November, we ought to be thanking them for their help in making the USA a better place.

Either way, you have to question the bona fides of someone who thinks that, by looking at Donald Trump's personal tax returns, you would have a clue as to where his ownership interests in any other country would be.  You see, Donald Trump doesn't build buildings out of his pocket; he is an owner of the Trump Organization, where all those "business interests" may reside.

The Trump Organization files its own corporate returns, so by the time his ownership stake is actually recorded in the president's own return, all you see is numbers, as in "the personal return included a $457, 223,109 taxable gain on his ownership of the Trump Organization", that sort of thing.  The corporation could have done business on Jupiter, and you wouldn't have a clue from President Trump's 1040.

I have written before that my advice to the now-president about a year ago would be this -- provide the first two pages of your Forms 1040 for the last dozen years, audit or not.  Let the dogs bark about what it all is supposed to mean and display their ignorance.  I'm sure that they will show that his income fluctuated hugely over the years between good years and bad for the company.  They will show that he paid a lot of taxes each year, more than you or I will in a lifetime.  And he can declare that since not one in 1,000 members of the press could even understand anything past page two, he was not about to have his return mischaracterized by the ignorant.

More importantly, the left will yowl like alley cats and nippy dogs about whatever is in there, even if they are as relatively innocuous and unfulfilling (to the left) as the leaked return on the Rachel Maddow show was.

So ... it does bear saying that the more intriguing and saddening aspect of the MSNBC interview was not the assumption that Debra Messing had anything to say of vital importance based on her acting career -- after all, we see conservatives like Dean Cain and Chuck Woolery as occasional commentators on Fox News as well.

No; it was the question asked by Morgan Radford on MSNBC, to wit, "Describe the threat that the current president is to our democracy ... when it comes to neutralizing that threat, do you think that activities like this ... is the way to make our [sic] voices heard?"

Are you hearing that?  A street reporter for a low-rating cable news network asked an actress to describe how the president of the United States is a threat to our democracy that needs to be "neutralized", whatever that means.  Now, if it were I, or an actual journalist with a shred of integrity, I would have phrased it thusly: "Tell me specifically how you regard the president as some kind of threat", i.e., putting the burden on the other person to justify her actions.

But when you have a mic-carrying leftist on both sides of the mic, who uses the term "our voices" instead of "your voices", where did objectivity in journalism go?  Why, for example, did Morgan Radford not ask something like, "In exactly what tax form filed by the president would you expect to see where he was supposed to have or not have any connections with Russia?  Would that be the 4797?  Or the 5396 or 5397?  I'm not sure, but since you think that information is in there, I'm sure you must have researched that, right?  No?"

The girl with the mic from MSNBC didn't happen to ask that, perhaps because she was too busy figuring out how to make "our" voices louder.

Or perhaps she knew Debra Messing didn't do her own taxes, so she probably wouldn't know.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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