Mr. Trump and Mr. Warren Buffett

When Donald Trump is confronted with an uncomfortable truth like the fact he has paid no federal income tax for 20 years, his reflex is to lie his way out of it--his first excuse was that if he had paid income tax the federal government would simply have squandered it, so he was simply too smart to pay his share.

When that started to sound like Leona Helmsley saying that only the little people pay taxes, which is to say only fools and weaklings pay taxes, Mr. Trump shifted to saying, well, as a billionaire, I'm only doing what other people in my class do, like Warren Buffett who claims even bigger deductions than I do, who rapes the system even more than I do. 

Turns out, that was untrue, and what makes it a lie is that Mr. Trump either knew it was untrue or was too unconcerned to verify it to take the time, which amounts to the same thing.

Turns out Mr. Buffett has paid over a million dollars in income tax for each of every year over the past decades. It is true, he pays at a rate of only 16%, but he pays.

Mr. Trump blandly waves off his income tax scam by claiming he already pays lots of different taxes already, and shouldn't be burdened with a trifling thing like the income tax.  After all he pays taxes at the gas pump, whenever he goes out to a restaurant, and sales taxes on all those expensive suits and ties.


Of course, we all pay those taxes right along with him; the difference is we also pay our income tax.


A lot of Trump supporters make too little income to actually pay taxes, so it may not bother them he doesn't pay any income tax.


One thing these debates do--they eventually illuminate some part of a man's character. We can not really know these people on stage, but we can know something about them.


What I can see in Trump is out there for anyone to see. If you don't see it, it's because you do not want to.