Hillary Clinton vowed Friday evening that her plan to make the wealthy pay their fair share would target tax loophole abuse, starting with GOP nominee Donald Trump.
“We’re going to go where the money is,” she said at a fundraiser in Seattle. “We’re going to make the wealthy pay their fair share and we’re going to finally close those corporate loopholes.”
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“And it would be a good idea to start with my opponent,” she added to thunderous applause. “We finally got him on the record admitting he hasn’t paid federal income tax for many years. That is just flat wrong.”
Clinton and her campaign surrogates have gone after Trump for his refusal to release his tax returns. When the Democratic nominee brought this up during the first presidential debate, and she suggested he has likely avoided paying federal income taxes, Trump bragged that he was smart to do so.
“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.
Trump replied, “That makes me smart.”
Later, at a campaign event in Des Moines, Iowa, Clinton turned Trump’s quip into an attack line.
“[Trump] actually is proud of the fact that he lets everybody else pay taxes. He says that makes him smart,” she said
“Well, I’ll tell you what, if not paying taxes makes him smart, what does that make the rest of us?” she asked.
She continued, turning her attention to Trump, and said, “He actually bragged about gaming the system to get out of paying his fair share in taxes, maybe not paying any taxes at all.”
“And what I really find so disturbing about this is he spends all of his time just dumping on America. Calling us a third-world country,” she said. “Saying our military is a disaster. That everything about America is in bad shape. But then it’s probably true, he hasn’t paid a penny in federal taxes to actually support our military, or our vets, or our schools, or our roads, or our education systems.”
Clinton and her team, including her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., have made Trump’s taxes a central theme of their campaign. The GOP nominee openly admitting he has avoided paying some taxes has only added to their arsenal.
