If someone complains that your taxes are too low, as do many liberals, and then tries to limit his or her own tax liability by taking every deduction to which he/she is legally entitled, as do many liberals, it's not unfair, I don't think, to conclude that this person is being hypocritical. But, if that's so, how might we describe those who insist that we all pay higher taxes while they themselves don't even pay their own taxes? That's evidently the situation at the very liberal MSNBC cable news station where four of their personalities owe a ton of money in unpaid taxes to the IRS.
According to Jillian Kay Melchior at National Review Online. Melchior tells us that Touré Neblett, co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, tweeted in January 2014, that, “Regressive taxation & tax-avoidance & union crushing & the financial corruption of legislation has fueled inequality more than hard work.” In 2012, he also criticized Republican politicians, saying they were “all afraid to vote for a modest tax increase of people who can totally afford it.” Now it turns out that Neblett himself owes the IRS more than $59,000 in taxes.
Joy-Ann Reid, who serves as managing editor of theGrio.com and until earlier this year hosted MSNBC’s The Reid Report has called taxes on the wealthy “a basic fairness argument,” also arguing for “smart spending and smart tax increases” to create economic growth, but last month New York filed a $4,948.15 tax warrant against Reid and her husband.
Melissa Harris-Perry, who hosts an MSNBC show named after herself, has claimed that, “We actually do better as a country when we spread the wealth around.” She has also quoted President Obama, calling income inequality “the fundamental threat to the American dream.” She called for Republican lawmakers to acknowledge that “the growing income disparity in America is, in fact, you know, a real thing,” but Ms Harris-Perry is herself a whopping $70,000 in arrears to the IRS.
Then there's Al Sharpton whose tax delinquency is almost legendary. In November, the New York Times estimated that Sharpton and his various enterprises owed as much as $4.5 million in taxes, penalties, and interest to the government.
These folks all think you should be paying more than you are, but think themselves somehow exempt. There's something delightfully schadenfreudeish in reading about people who lecture us about how we should all be forking over more of our income to the government, how we should be paying our "fair share," while they get caught trying to get away with paying nothing at all.