Implode-o-Meter News - Donald Trump's great tax dodge: How the nominee avoided paying millions in taxes

Instead of then reporting this forgiven debt for what it was --Â hundreds of millions of dollars of taxable income --Â Trump took advantage of the fact that his three Atlantic City casinos were owned through partnerships instead of corporations. As a result, he offered the investors partnership equity instead of stock, then applied that logic to the "stock-for-debt swap" in order to avoid paying income taxes.
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"Whatever loophole existed was not â€˜exploited' here, but stretched beyond any recognition," Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told The New York Times. This sentiment was echoed in an interview with John L. Buckley, who served as chief of staff for Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation in 1993 and 1994, who observed "he's getting something for absolutely nothing."

With either of the two theories on what Trump did (one involving partnerships and one involving S-corps), Hillary Clinton ironically voted for bills that closed the "loopholes".

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Donald Trump's great tax dodge: How the nominee avoided paying millions in taxes