Under fire after admitting to billing taxpayers for trips taken on private planes owned by her husband's company, Sen. Claire McCaskill admitted today she owes $300,000 in property taxes on those planes:
McCaskill said she'd pay the bill immediately and has told her husband to "sell the damn plane."
"I will never set foot on the plane again," McCaskill said.
McCaskill, a first-term Missouri Democrat, narrowly defeated incumbent GOP Sen. Jim Talent in 2006, and she faced an already uphill re-election fight next year. Democrats control 53 seats in the Senate, and with slew of retirements, McCaskill's problems cast yet more uncertainty on the party's efforts to retain its thin majority.
The airplane foul-up has handed Republicans a tailor-made issue to attack the image that McCaskill has so carefully built as an opponent of government excess and secrecy.
McCaskill has already had to face questions about why she used the plane for a political trip that her office mistakenly billed to the taxpayers. Using public funds for political travel is prohibited by Senate rules.
3 comments:
I'm not great fan but if McCaskill was going to charter a plane, why not charter a plane owned by her husband's company?
Is it any different than Walmart leasing the trucks which haul Walmart goods from a company owned by Walmart?
Or a non-profit company owned by Joe Smith contracting with a for-profit company owned by Joe Smith to provide the labor for the non-profit and the non-profit leasing office space from a building owned by Joe Smith.
I don't think there is anything illegal here. Bad PR, yes, but people got short memories. Hell, we elected Billy Long!
You gotta be kidding me.
Tax evasion is illegal.
Al Capone even went to jail for it.
Really? Seriously? Nothing illegal?
Wow. Just wow.
Anonymous 5:11 - try not paying your property taxes and let us know how that goes for ya...
I also acknowledge that it’s a far cry from Claire’s tax liability. The issue wasn’t amount owed, it was credibility that Sarah has on taxes after another poster brought her into the fray. Sarah took advantage of the citizens who pay taxes in Alaska. Obviously, not to the degree Claire did. Also, falling back and responding only with ‘typical leftist’ statements are lazy. You should work on expressing your feelings with words!
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