Trump Should Release Taxes, Majority in Michigan Poll Say

Nearly three-fourths of likely Michigan voters think Donald Trump should release his income tax returns, according to a poll taken last week — and that was before published reports that the Republican presidential nominee may not have paid taxes in 18 years.

Trump is the first presidential candidate in four decades not to release his tax returns — a point Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton exploited at last week’s presidential debate.

“Maybe he doesn't want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he's paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody's ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn't pay any federal income tax,” Clinton said.

That, Trump retorted, “makes me smart.”

On Saturday, The New York Times reported that Trump declared a $900 million loss on his 1995 tax return, a loss so great that he could have avoided paying any federal income tax for the next 18 years.

The Detroit News/WDIV statewide poll of 600 likely voters, conducted Sept. 27-28 by the Glengariff Group Inc., showed Hillary Clinton with a 7-point lead in Michigan.

Among all voters surveyed, 72 percent thought Trump should release his tax returns, The Detroit News reported. Among those who identified themselves as Trump supporters, 48 percent said he should release them, and 30 percent said he shouldn’t make them public. Among undecided voters, 70 percent said he should follow tradition and release his federal returns.

“When even a plurality of your own supporters say you should release them, it’s a clear answer what voters believe on this issue,” pollster Richard Czuba, president of the Glengariff Group Inc., said. “Nearly every demographic group except Republican voters are above 60 percent in release of his taxes.”

After The New York Times report, Trump took to Twitter and said that he understands the nation’s “complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president and am the only one who can fix them.”

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has been advising Trump, told CNN Sunday the New York business is a “a genius,”

“The reality is, this is part of our tax code,” Giuliani said. “The man's a genius. He knows how to operate the tax code to the benefit of the people he's serving.”

Giuliani said didn’t do anything that other successful business people haven’t done, asserting that “this is rather common in large, gigantic American businesses.”

Jake Tapper, the host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” disagreed in the contentious interview.
“I think that there are a lot of very, very successful businessmen and women who pay federal income taxes and don't look for every single opportunity there is to avoid paying them,” he said.

What do you think? Does The New York Times report change your opinion of Donald Trump? Should he release his tax returns? Tell us in the comments.

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr Commons