Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump spoke out against the tax treatment of fund managers in an interview on Sunday, saying that GPs are “getting away with murder” under the current tax code.
Trump told CBS’s Face the Nation that he would change the tax laws to force hedge fund managers to pay more in taxes. His comments during the show followed up on views expressed in an interview with TIME last week, in which he stated he wants to “switch taxes around” because “I have hedge fund guys that are making a lot of money that aren’t paying anything.”
In the CBS interview, he called hedge fund managers “paper-pushers,” going on to say: “They're paying nothing and it's ridiculous. I want to save the middle class…The hedge fund guys didn't build this country. These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”
Trump's comments were referring to the so-called “carried interest loophole,” a provision in the tax code that allows private equity and hedge fund managers to pay taxes at the capital gains rate of 20 percent instead of the ordinary income rate of 39.6 percent for top earners.
Although Trump is hoping to gain the Republican nomination, his take on GP pay mirrors that of Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, who has vowed to close the “carried interest loophole.”
“There’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers that I saw on I-80 as I was driving here over the last two days,” said Clinton during a campaign stop in Iowa back in April.
Democrats and Republicans have battled for years on the tax treatment of carried interest. Various bills to change the tax designation on carry to ordinary income have been put forward repeatedly over the past six years, but none have garnered enough support to become law.
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