What We Learned from the Donald Trump-Marco Rubio Screamfest

Trump went even further, raising the possibility, to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, that he was being audited because he was a “strong Christian.”)

.. Cruz, with leading questions and prosecutorial zeal, forced Trump to acknowledge that he does not, indeed, want people to die “on the sidewalks and the streets.” Cruz made it clear that he considered this a damning admission.

.. Although he likes to portray himself as a successful entrepreneur who created a vastly profitable business, many people in the business world have long regarded him as a self-promoting huckster who emblazons his name on properties that don’t belong to him and habitually overstates his net worth.

.. During the debate, he claimed that tax returns don’t give any indication of a person’s wealth, which is nonsense. If Trump’s various businesses are worth as much as he claims they are, they must generate a great deal of revenue and income, at least some of which would be reflected on his tax returns.

.. Back in the nineteen-seventies, Johnston points out, New York City Mayor Abe Beame gave Trump a four-hundred-million-dollar tax abatement to facilitate his first big real-estate deal, the conversion of a hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. During the nineteen-eighties, when the city refused to give Trump seven hundred million dollars in tax breaks for his controversial Riverside South development, he had a bitter dispute with Mayor Ed Koch.

The Intractable Problem of Tax Havens

His proposed solution involves three elements. One is the creation of a global financial register, modeled on existing information depositories such as Clearstream, to keep track of who owns all the financial securities in circulation throughout the world. This would include data on the ownership of mutual fund shares, as well as stocks and bonds.

.. Wall Street and the City of London are major players in an industry that the American and British governments publicly condemn. While their elected officials may bemoan revenue losses from tax evasion, these countries are playing a double game, facilitating that evasion through their own financial-services industries.

.. For those two nations in particular, cracking down on international tax evasion would deal a serious blow to their economies. The interest groups representing finance wield a great deal of political power

.. Considering the political influence of the firms and professional groups who orchestrate tax evasion on a global scale, it seems very unlikely that an effective strategy could be developed through democratic means.