Posted on 03/06/2007 8:48:02 AM PST by janereinheimer
OF COURSE LAWMAKERS OUGHT TO PAY INCOME TAX ON GIFTED TRIPS
Everybody knows that for years and years and years, lawmakers have taken their spouses along on their little junkets. The travel, meals and hotel rooms have fair market value that the rest of us little people would find ourselves taxed on. So why should the lawmakers think they're so much different from the rest of us.
Who really needs to go to Peru anyway? Just to look at an Incan mountaintop? How could that possibly have anything to do with the official business of running the U.S. Senate?
And why did you have to take a huge entourage that included your wife, Mr. Senator Reid? That was not a fact-finding trip -- it was a vacation. Your part of the cost ought to have been taxable too.
In an article by Mike Soraghan posted in The Hill this morning, there have been complaints filed with the IRS that lawmakers have been getting away with this kind of abuse far too long and it ought to stop.
Soraghan quoted Craig Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist who lodged the complaint. Holman said, "The IRS isn't going to let me not pay taxes on income like that."
Soraghan says that spouses and family members went out on about 9% of sponsored trips. That's according to a study of congressional travel by the Center for Public Integrity. The Center found that in the year prior to July 2006 corporations and trade and nonprofit groups spent more than $5.4 million to send lawmakers and congressional staffers on about 2,700 trips.
But wait, that's down from 4,700 trips that cost $10.3 million the year before.
And I'll just bet you that if people who accompany the lawmakers have to start paying taxes on their little vacations, it will go way way down from that figure.
We can only hope. I say the way to start reducing the budget is one dollar at a time. Or maybe that's a million at a time. Heck, they've got so much money out there in Maybeville, what's a few more zeroes of voterbucks.
Maybe that's what we ought to tell them. It's our taxes they're spending. Voterbucks.
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