Donald Trump's Real Tax Return Problem

Republican 2016 front-runner Donald Trump has a taxing problem: his tax returns.

After 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney trolled The Donald by saying that Trump won't release his tax returns because he has something to hide – which, remember, is exactly what Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid said about Romney four years ago – the other candidates took the baton and ran with it during the latest GOP debate Thursday night.

For instance, Sen. Ted Cruz said, "He can release past year's tax returns. He can do it tomorrow. He doesn't want to do it, because presumably there's something in there."

Sen. Marco Rubio said, "Here's a guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn't inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now? … Better release your tax returns so we can see how much money he made."

And moderator Wolf Blitzer even got in on the act, starting a fracas by asking "Romney said either you're not as wealthy as you say you are, said maybe you haven't paid the kind of taxes we would expect you to pay, or you haven't been giving the money to veterans or disabled people. Are any of those accusations that he has leveled true?"

Trump's response was that he'd love to release his beautiful, classy tax returns, but that he can't because he is being audited, a problem which, I'm willing to wager, will conveniently make it impossible for him to release them until sometime after November 8.

And the content of Trump's returns is a legitimate issue: It's a standard rite of passage for presidential candidates to release their tax returns as an exercise in transparency and for policing conflicts of interest. It'd certainly be interesting to see what sort of tax rate Trump pays and what sort of estate planning he has engaged in. (Remember Romney's absurd $100 million IRA?) How much money did he make on businesses, such as his Trump University, that were built on fraud?

But the bigger tax issue for Trump actually occurred before the brouhaha over his returns: When asked what he would cut from the federal budget in order to pay for his $9.5 trillion tax cut proposal, he named some usual conservative bugaboos like the Department of Education. When CNN's Wolf Blitzer pointed out that Trump's cuts would come nowhere close to offsetting the astronomical cost of his proposed tax plan – which includes an average tax cut of $1.3 million for those in the richest 0.1 percent – Trump fell back on the favorite line of a politician out of his depth on the budget: "Waste, fraud and abuse."

Trump surely isn't alone, though. The fact of the matter is that all of the GOP candidates' tax plans are built on fantasy and fairy dust. They dwarf the Bush tax cuts, shoveling heaps of new tax breaks at the wealthy despite America's vast and growing income inequality. The numbers are enough to make your head spin: In addition to Trump's $9.5 trillion tax cut, there's Cruz's $8.6 trillion and Rubio's $6.8 trillion. Bush's budget-busting tax cuts, remember, cost around $1.5 trillion. Rubio wants to completely eliminate investment taxes; Cruz wants to eliminate the corporate income tax and replace it with a value-added tax that he swears up and down isn't actually one.

The plans are uniformly ridiculous, yet the candidates haven't often faced the sort of question on which Blitzer pressed Trump: How on Earth will you cover the cost while achieving the balanced budget you claim to think is so imperative?

Releasing tax returns is one thing. But Trump, Rubio, Cruz and, yes, even afterthoughts John Kasich and Ben Carson, should have to release realistic paths toward their tax and budget goals. I imagine they'll find doing so to be a yuuuuge issue.