Washington: The tax-avoidance strategies that President Donald Trump capitalized on to shrink his tax bill to essentially zero are surprisingly common among major real estate developers and other uber-wealthy Americans.
Yet Trump characteristically pushed those strategies to the limit, perhaps to the breaking point.
So say tax experts in the wake of a New York Times report Sunday that found that Trump paid only $750 in taxes in both 2016 and 2017 and none at all in 11 of the 18 years that the newspaper examined.
The things that Trump did are typical of wealthy businesspeople and particularly wealthy real estate developers, said Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Still, Wamhoff noted, Trump claims the special breaks and loopholes that are available in the tax…