Now, to understand why this is so important, consider the recent examples we've seen of egregious corporate behaviour. Look at Wells Fargo. Really shocking, isn't it? One of the nation's biggest banks bullying thousands of employees into committing fraud against unsuspecting customers. Secretly opening up millions of accounts for people without their consent, even their knowledge. Misusing personal information and then sticking customers with hidden fees.
It is outrageous that eight years after a cowboy culture on Wall Street wrecked our economy, we are still seeing powerful bankers playing fast and loose with the law.
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And then in a category by himself, there's Donald Trump.
Well, you may have heard that he has long refused to release his tax returns, the way every other nominee for president has done for decades. You can look at 40 years of my tax returns. I think we need a law that says, "if you become the nominee of the major parties, you have to release your tax returns".
Now, a lot of us were wondering, what is he hiding? It must be really terrible. Well, The New York Times has discovered at least part of the answer. Back in the 1990s, Trump apparently lost a billion dollars in a single year on bad investments and failing casinos. Now, how anybody can lose a dollar, let alone a billion dollars in the casino industry is kind of beyond me, right? It's just hard to figure. But as a result, it doesn't look like he paid a dime of federal income tax for almost two decades.
Now, while millions of American families, including mine and yours, were working hard paying our fair share, it seems he was contributing nothing to our nation. Imagine that. Not fair. Nothing for Pell grants to help kids go to college. Nothing for veterans. Nothing for our military. And you know, he has been dissing America in this whole campaign, right? He talks us down. He makes disparaging comments about our country. He calls our military a disaster. Well, it's not, but it might have been if everybody else had failed to pay taxes to support our brave men and women in uniform.
Now, Trump represents the same rigged system that he claims he's going to change. The whole story tells us everything we need to know about how Trump does business. After he made all of those bad bets and lost all that money, he didn't lift a finger to help and protect his employees, or all the small businesses and contractors he'd hired, or the people of Atlantic City. They all got hammered.
While he was busy with his accountants trying to figure out how to keep living like a billionaire, and all the while he was using his political connections to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in government subsidies and extra tax breaks for his companies. In other words, Trump was taking from America with both hands, and leaving the rest of us with the bill.
Now, he says that he's the one who can fix things, but that is like letting the fox guard the hen house, right?
And here's what I really am just stunned by. He has put forth a tax plan that would cut his own taxes even more. It would be like you're playing - paying zero, you expect us to pay you to stay in business, all the rest of us in America?
He would open the loopholes even wider. And according to a new independent study, he would actually - listen to this, people, because this is a real shocker. His plan would actually raise taxes for millions of middle class families.
Yesterday, his campaign was bragging, it makes him a genius. Here's my question. What kind of genius loses a billion dollars in a single year?
This is Trump to a T. He's taken corporate excess and made a business model out of it. He abuses his power, games the system, puts his own interests ahead of the country's. It's Trump first and everyone else last.
And there are lots of principled, law-abiding business leaders out there who are horrified by all of this. Not a single - not a single CEO of a Fortune 100 company supports Trump's campaign.
It's time to rewrite the rules and make this economy fair for everyone.
And today, I want to briefly share with you my plan for protecting taxpayers, consumers, small businesses and workers. We're going to crack down on the worst corporate abuses and empower companies willing to take the high road and invest in good jobs in higher wages and in stronger communities.
First, let's start with protecting taxpayers and making sure we have more fairness in the system. It is wrong that corporations and the super wealthy play by a different set of rules. A Wall Street money manager should not be able to pay a lower tax rate than a teacher or a nurse.
And I'll tell you something else. Our largest companies should not be able to get away with paying hardly anything at all. It is insulting when they engage in these games like moving their headquarters over to a foreign country, on paper, not in reality, just to take advantage of lower tax breaks.
And it's infuriating when they take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips in America with the other hand.
So here's what we're going to do. We're going to close those loopholes. I have got a list of them we're going after. We're going to make Wall Street corporations and the super rich start paying their fair share of taxes. We're going to pass something called the Buffett Rule, which means multimillionaires cannot pay lower rates than their secretaries and other people working for them.
We're going to put in place a new exit tax. If companies try to leave our country to avoid paying their fair share, if they try to outsource jobs, they're going to have to give back every tax break they ever received in our country.
And then we're going to put that money to work creating opportunities here in America.
Edited excerpt from Democrat US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign speech in Toledo, Ohio, on October 3