All of us do what Trump does: try to pay less tax

That doesn’t disqualify him from being president

Throughout the Canada Revenue Agency website, the government tells you exactly how you can pay less income tax. In the section about RRSPs, for example, it says contributions “can be used to reduce your tax.”

We need people of moderate to significant means to pay toward everything from garbage collection to health care. But we are all encouraged, by each other and even by the government, to pay as little tax as possible.

If you get a big tax refund, do you think, “Oh no, the government will have less money to spend on education” or “Great, I can go to Florida next winter”? The government even rewards people whom it considers to be behaving well by letting them pay less in tax, through tax credits for a wide range of activities. When it wants to discourage certain conduct, it creates and increases taxes, like the new price on carbon the federal government introduced this week.

Amid this culture of tax avoidance it should be neither surprising nor alarming that a wealthy political candidate has managed to pay little to no income tax over an extended period of time. And unless there is evidence he broke the rules and cheated the system, it shouldn’t be a reason for him not be president.

The concept of paying your fair share doesn’t apply to taxes in our culture. Unless you’re a billionaire, your share is understood to be the smallest amount you can get away with paying under the law. There are shades of grey, of course, fine lines between following the rules, bending them and exploiting them. But fraud is when you cheat on your taxes, not when you use

His refusal to release his tax returns makes him look like he has something to hide.

tax law to your advantage.

At a basic level, taxes are like charitable donations: money moving from people, more or less according to their means, toward a public good. But in our society, someone who gives a lot of money to charity is a hero and a philanthropist. Someone who pays too much in taxes is a fool.

Of course, running for president is not just about obeying the law, and there are certainly bad optics around the news that Donald Trump may have paid little to no tax for two decades. It complicates an already tricky narrative Trump is trying to weave around his financial and business acumen. On one hand, he’s a hugely successful entrepreneur. On the other hand, he’s faced bankruptcy multiple times, brags about not paying suppliers and suffered big losses that he has used to his advantage.

There’s also an order of magnitude to Trump’s tax avoidance that will allow many Americans to feel justified in chastising him. But few of them would voluntarily avoid tax breaks that were legally available to them.

Trump’s handling of the situation hasn’t made it any better. His refusal to release his tax returns makes him look like he has something to hide. His arguments are weak and misplaced. He claims, for example, that not paying taxes was to the benefit of his shareholders and partners, when it’s on his personal income taxes where he likely generated the greatest windfall. He could stand to boast a little bit less — “I’m a genius! I’m brilliant!” — and talk more about the flaws of the system.

There’s also the question of what Trump has chosen to do with all the money he saved in taxes. Is he the kind of person who donates a lot of money to charity? No, he’s the kind of person who uses other people’s donations to his charitable foundation as a way of settling corporate lawsuits.

But of all the reasons Trump is unfit for the presidency, it’s curious that the one that’s getting the most traction is largely illegitimate. If you want people like Trump to pay more tax, you shouldn’t expect them to do it voluntarily. You should vote for someone who will change the rules.

Unless he cheated, Trump was just doing what millions of Americans do every year: paying as little tax as possible.