If I were Donald Trump — a stretch, to be sure — I’d respond to Hillary Clinton’s nudging by refusing to release my tax return, now or ever. It’s none of her, or anyone else’s, business.

The idea that baring one’s tax return should be required of presidential candidates strikes me as an affront to privacy. If anyone in the government released Trump’s tax return, they’d be prosecuted.

Clinton’s fixation on this illuminates how she thinks about taxes, money, property and privacy. In the debate at Hofstra, she speculated on three reasons for Trump’s reticence.

One: Trump is “not as rich as he says he is” (neither was Midas). Two: “Maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be” (Scrooge McTrump). Three: He doesn’t want Americans to see “he’s paid nothing in federal taxes.”

At this point, Trump interjected to suggest that paying nothing in federal taxes would make him smart. That went right past Comrade Clinton, who thinks of tax revenues as the government’s money, not the capitalists’.

Instead, Clinton suggested Trump has “paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health.” Then she said “it must be something really important, even terrible” that Trump is “trying to hide.”

What backward logic. Were Trump trying to hide something “terrible,” why in the name of Al Capone would he put it in his tax return? That would hand it over to the tax cops at the IRS.

If one had something terrible to hide, like ill-gotten gains, maybe, one is more likely — this, too, is but speculation — to hand it over to a tax haven, like, say, the Clinton Foundation.

The very purpose of that foundation is to permit rich people to reduce their taxes by letting the Clintons use their money. In turn, the Clintons get to use the lucre to do what they, instead of the government, deem to be good works.

Just for the record (and since Clinton brought it up), the Los Angeles Times reports that the Clinton Foundation said it had sent a scant $105,000 to veterans’ organizations — since 2006.

That would suggest that on average over the past decade the Clintons dropped about $10,000 a year on vets. That’s in a period during which rich people have ladled into the foundation hundreds of millions of dollars.

Against which, just to underline the point, these rich persons will save on their own taxes. Fine with me, but so much for Clinton’s malarkey about vets, troops, schools and health.

The whole ruckus over Trump’s tax return is a smokescreen for Clinton to avoid talking about tax policy, jobs and growth. These are the issues on which Trump made his strongest showing in the debate.

America has emerged in recent decades as a high-tax country. So $2.5 trillion or more is now trapped overseas in the coffers of American companies that dare not bring it home.

They fear that much of it will be taken away in taxes. Hillary Clinton, meet “Atlas Shrugged.” She and President Obama have learned the hard way that the owners of that $2.5 trillion are in a position to wait.

If the $2.5 trillion trapped overseas were allowed home, Trump pointed out Tuesday, it could be put to work by companies to create factories and jobs in, among other places, America’s inner cities.

Clinton has offered nothing to address this. She’d essentially continue Obama’s economic policy even though he’s set to be the only president in modern American history never to have had a single year of growth of 3 percent or higher.

Clinton just doesn’t want — or know how — to talk about that. She wants to distract voters by conjuring imaginary horrors about The Donald’s tax return, and he was waiting for her.

Trump announced in the middle of the debate that he’d release his tax returns when Clinton releases the 33,000 missing emails. Before that, his position was he’d wait for the end of his audit.

Then again, too, he also announced in the debate that his audit has been going on for 15 years. He could have told her just to flake off. But it turns out that The Donald is too polite.

Lipsky@nysun.com