The Millennial View: Trump not only one playing games with tax returns

According to the headlines, every candidate left standing has offered for public scrutiny his or her most private financial documents.

Breaking with decades of presidential vetting tradition, they have released only summary information about their tax liabilities, as contained on the first two pages of the federal form known as a 1040.

“[The IRS] wouldn’t accept an incomplete return, and neither should reporters — or voters,” says Joseph J. Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts and an adjunct professor at the Northwestern University School of Law.

The materials that most of the candidates have released, after all, are missing all the important information that politicians’ tax returns are supposed to illuminate.

To give you a sense of how consequential such disclosures have been in the not-so-distant past, note that Cruz released his full, “long-form” tax returns when he was running for Senate in 2012.

When you campaign on your faith and accountability, people might hold you accountable for certain financial manifestations of that faith.

No wonder, then, that when he later released more recent years of tax data, he stripped out information that would allow curious voters to examine whether he’d in fact done a better job walking in his faith since 2012, at least according to the tithing goals he had apparently set for himself.

Cruz’s attempt to pass off his recent releases as “tax returns” is especially galling when you consider that tax return simplification is a key plank of his campaign.

The revolutionarily simple “size of a postcard” tax return he promises voters looks less revolutionarily simple when you realize it’s almost identical to the ultra-short form he’s pretending tax returns already take.