Trump’s Tax Avoidance Was Perfectly Legal. That’s Why It’s an Issue.
By Eric Levitz
October 4, 2016
3:11 p.m.
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Morning Joe ✔
@Morning_Joe
.@morningmika to Clinton: Get off your high horse about this tax thing. Unless laws were broken, it's not an issue.
6:38 AM - 4 Oct 2016
731 Retweets 865 likes
The copious problems with this analysis all flow from three basic premises:
1. Policy and reality dont matter.
2. Personality and perception do.
3. The political media has no responsibility to try to change these facts.
First, lets take Scarboroughs opening salvo: To say that Hillary Clinton is more in the pocket of Wall Street than anybody else who has run for president is to pretend that policy agendas dont exist. Clinton has certainly collected a tremendous amount of campaign donations from the finance industry. As the front-runner and the one remaining candidate whose election isnt
widely considered a threat to the global economy it makes sense that Wall Street would invest in her.
But to say that she is more in the pocket of Wall Street than her opponent is to suggest that she is more likely to do the finance industrys bidding once she gains power. This is factually wrong, as my colleague Jonathan Chait
recently observed:
The reality is that Clinton favors strengthening the already-tough regulations on Wall Street created by Dodd-Frank, by levying a risk fee on the largest banks and tightening the Volcker Rule. Trump, on the other hand, proposes close to dismantling of Dodd-Frank, which, he claims, has made it impossible for bankers to function.
One doesnt need to personally trust Clinton to know she will be tougher on Wall Street than her opponent. For Clinton, the political price of repealing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Dodd-Franks other reforms is immense she would lose the support of an enormous swath of her partys base. This is not the case for Trump, who has lost none of his base since calling for a moratorium on financial regulations.
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/trumps-tax-avoidance-was-legal-thats-why-its-an-issue.html