**Written by Doug Powers

Sunday open thread time! Have at it.

Just one “starter” topic today, because the New York Times has come back to the future with a bombshell:

Apparently Donald Trump’s 1995 tax forms were obtained, and the New York Times is using one year of returns to help spread the word that it’s possible Trump didn’t pay any federal taxes for the ensuing nearly two decades:

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

Naturally, once the media get their talking points from the Hillary campaign, that’ll all be condensed to “Trump hasn’t paid any taxes since at least 1995.” And who knows, maybe he has — maybe he hasn’t — but you can be pretty sure some of the Aunt Pittypats at the Times and in Hillary’s campaign who are getting the vapors over legal tax maneuvers might have $2 write-off for an underwear donation skeletons in their own tax return closets.

Almost as if they were tipped off that the Times was going to drop this story, Hillary Clinton’s campaign immediately pounced, and so did Bernie Sanders:

If only Bernie could have spent decades as a member of some sort of legislative body that writes the nation’s tax laws! Oh, wait.

Rumor has it that political scientists at the Times are using Trump’s ’95 forms to, A) Determine how the universe came to be; B) Reveal more details about the tragic end that awaits humanity, and C) Hope it’s all enough to make people forget to ask why the NYT can obtain a 21-year-old tax return but can’t seem to get their hands on transcripts of Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speeches.

So, if it’s OK to use Trump’s 1995 tax return as “proof” he didn’t pay federal taxes for 18 years, can 1998’s Starr Report be cited as a “pretty safe assumption” that Bill Clinton’s been cheating on his wife ever since?

Have a good Sunday all!

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe