Donald Trump: “hedge funds are getting away with murder”

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he would change the tax laws to force people who work at hedge funds to pay more in taxes, because “the hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.”

In an interview with Time Magazine published last week, Trump said he might want to “switch taxes around” because “I have hedge fund guys that are making a lot of money that aren’t paying anything.” He confirmed on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday that he would change the tax system to force those who work for hedge funds to pay more.

“They’re paying nothing and it’s ridiculous. I want to save the middle class,” Donald Trump said. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”  VW: Kinda like Trump does with his real estate and bankruptcy dealings?

Hedge fund managers often pay the capital gains tax rate rather than income tax. The top rate on capital gains is 20 percent, which is significantly less than the top tax bracket on regular income, which is 39.6 percent.

Trump indicated that he would carry out this plan regardless of his relationship with hedge fund managers. VW note: many prominent hedge fund managers are backing Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump (at least for now). However, the populist card seems to be working with voters on both the left and the right as concerns over income inequality grow.

“Some of them are friends of mine, some of them I couldn’t care less about. It’s the wrong thing,” he said. He added that he wants to lower rates for the middle class.

Trump also suggested he is shifting on the idea of whether campaign donations are a good idea.

From Time Magazine:

Well I’m thinking about it but I have a problem because I may want to switch taxes around. I want to save the middle class. And I have hedge fund guys that are making a lot of money that aren’t paying anything, okay. And I don’t know how his pledge relates to that.

But I know a lot of bad people in this country that are making a hell of a lot of money and not paying taxes. And the tax law is totally screwed up. The complexity of it, the size of it. I mean I spent millions of dollars every year on lawyers and accountants just to do a tax return. And I want to put H&R Block out of business. I want to make it very simple. And we can leave the tax code the way it is and simplify it, or you could go to a form of a flat tax. You could go to a fair tax. There’s a lot of things you could do.

Probably the simplest is simplify the existing. Because we have other projects. We have to beat China. We have to beat Japan. We have to beat Mexico. We have to beat everybody that beating us, which is 100% of the countries that we do business with. We have a lot of other things to work on.

As president would you propose changes that increased the net amount of taxes?

No, because there’s so much waste in Washington.

See the full article from CBS here, Time here and the full video with Donald Trump below.

 

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