Tax Dodger Network Blasts Taxpayer

On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow reported on President Trump's 2005 tax return which she had in hand.  It turns out that Trump paid taxes!  Yes, he paid $38 million on $150 million of income, which is about 25%.  That is a higher percentage than MSNBC Corporate owner, Comcast (24%), President Obama (19%), or Bernie Sanders (13%).  Why was this newsworthy?

 

And then I came across this article and thought about only those without sin may cast stones.  It turns out that quite a few people at MSNBC have had tax problems.  Reverend Al Sharpton leads the pack with $1.5 million in back taxes to both New York and the federal government.  Former host Toure had a long run of tax troubles from 2008 to 2012 for a quarter of a million dollars.  Former host Melissa Harris-Perry was into the feds for $70K in 2015.  Chris Matthews had a $4,000 lien placed on him by the state of Maryland last year.  The guy earns $5 million a year.  Supposing that he works 50 hour weeks and only takes a couple weeks of vacation a year, that works out to $2,000 an hour.  How do you let a 2 hour tax problem spiral to the point that the state of Maryland imposes a lien?  There is a story I would like to see reported, especially since this is a guy who demands the rich pay more since they don't need it.

 

The point of this story was to get ratings for Maddow.  She is currently skyrocketing and this will likely have been a ratings homerun.  Such is short term thinking.  How many anti-Trumpers watched with anticipation of a Trump-crushing scandal to be revealed only to find out that he made a lot of money and paid a lot of taxes on it?  The tax return in no way supported the conspiracy theory she outlined before the big reveal.

Obama's Columbia Scandal

William Allyn Root, the Libertarian VP candidate from 2008 (I voted for him), coincidentally graduated Columbia University the same year as President Obama.  Despite the fact that they both had the same major, Root has no recollection of Obama.  With a typical student, that would hardly seem surprising but Obama managed to get into Harvard afterwards, so one expects him to be a stand out student.  The Wall Street Journal contacted 400 other graduates from 1983 and none of them remembered Barack Obama (his name was Barry Soetoro at the time).  That's peculiar.

Mr. Root has a theory: Obama got into Columbia as a foreign exchange student.  He had lived in Indonesia from 1966 to 1971.  His mother went back to Indonesia in 1975 and remained there while Barack lived with his grandparents in Hawaii before going to Occidental in 1979.  How did a self-confessed member of the Choom Gang (i.e. pot smokers) who spent part of his high school years in a haze (according to his autobiography) manage to get into a prestigious private school?  It wasn't family wealth.  Then he transferred to Columbia in 1981 where we are led to believe that he excelled though none of the alumni remember him.  Root posits that all this makes perfect sense if Obama had been accepted as an exchange student.  The requirements would be lower, such students often missed classes, and there could even be a competition among Ivy League colleges to recruit him.  Add to this that his publisher in the early 90s listed his birthplace as Kenya:

http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2012/05/publishers-booklet-obama-born-in-kenya/.

Still, this is just a theory supported by some deductive reasoning based on Obama's refusal to release his college transcripts. That's not unusual, right?  Let's look at recent candidates.  George W. Bush, John Kerry, and Al Gore all released their college transcripts, which is how we know Bush and Kerry got equivalent grades at Yale and Gore got a D in Natural Sciences at Harvard. By contrast, we know nothing of Obama's academic record though we presume it is awesome. If the grades are awesome, why not release them to great fanfare?  Even if they aren't great, he wouldn't be the first president with mediocre grades.

Root suggests that Romney agree to swap tax records for college transcripts.  He is certain that Obama  won't take the deal and will have to drop the tax record demands.  If that were to happen, it would almost certainly confirm Root's theory.