I don’t judge Donald Trump if he did in fact avoid paying income taxes for up to 18 years. Nor do I consider Mitt Romney a man of lesser character for paying a 14 percent tax rate. Nor should anyone attack President Obama for paying a measly 18.7 percent tax rate while his staff members are charged far more. I won’t even bring up the free ride the president is taking on the backs of small-business owners, who pay up to 50 percent of their income in taxes in states such as New York, California or Connecticut while their president sits in the White House with a tax rate 30 percentage points lower. But let’s not hate the player. Let’s save our contempt for the game.
In this confounding game, Congress has pieced together a collection of rules for billionaires that give massive tax breaks to real-estate developers, hedge-fund titans and trust-fund babies who spend their lives moving money from one financial institution to another instead of sweating away in jobs where they pick up paychecks every few weeks for a job well done.
Trump, Romney and Obama are doing what you and I try to do every year by paying as little legally to the IRS as possible. But a system that allows these powerful leaders to skate past the tax man on April 15 is deeply offensive and even immoral in these times when the wealthiest Americans get richer by the day, the poorest sink deeper into despair and members of the middle class wage a war against technology, globalization and growing debt that they are sure to lose unless Washington wakes up. It is too much to hope that politicians will be shocked into action by the New York Times story on Trump’s 1995 tax returns. But if members of Congress want to see their approval ratings rise above 20 percent one day, they might want to start requiring billionaires, presidents and real-estate tycoons to pay a higher tax rate than the workers who toil away for their causes every day.