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As the U.S. presidential campaign entered its home stretch on 1 October 2016, the New York Times released a partial income tax return for GOP candidate Donald Trump — the only tax information for Trump made public so far — showing that he deducted business losses in 1995 totaling $916 million. The amount was so substantial, the Times' tax experts concluded, that it could have allowed Trump to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, a scenario not unlike one posited by Democratic contender Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate days earlier: The Trump tax revelations spurred Clinton to take up the cudgel yet again. What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in a single year? she said in a 3 October speech. This is Trump to a tee. He's taken corporate excess and made a business model out of it. To which Trump supporters responded by questioning the $6 billion in government funds Clinton reportedly lost when she was in charge of the U.S. State Department: We're not going to argue that the comparison isn't valid — it is, in a sense — but it is our job to point out that the above wording misrepresents the facts. When Hillary Clinton's State Department received an inspector general's alert in 2014 charging that the paperwork on $6 billion in government contracts hadn't been properly accounted for, it didn't mean, despite some loosey-goosey media reporting at the time, that the money itself was lost or missing. State Department inspector general Steve Linick clarified what happened thusly: So, if the point of comparing Trump's and Clinton's losses is to imply that Clinton literally misplaced $6 billion in taxpayer monies, it fails. If the point, however, is that Clinton ought to be held responsible for mismanagement of the department's record keeping practices such that $6 billion in government spending was inadequately accounted for, it's well taken.
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