For a Big Government cheerleader like Nancy Pelosi, April 15 should be a more frenzied celebration than even Christmas. Tax Day is when all her plans for government are finally funded. I’m surprised Nancy isn’t down at the Treasury Department passing out party hats and balloons.
I wasn’t the least bit surprised when she called President Trump’s recent tax cut bill an “apocalypse” and claimed it was a “monumental, brazen theft from the middle class.” Given her outraged rhetoric, I assumed Pelosi would overpay her taxes to make up for the pocket-picking done by heartless Republican exploiters of the downtrodden.
So, you can imagine my surprise when I learned that Pelosi jumped through hoops to take one last advantage of the “tax breaks for the wealthiest one percent” that she claimed were so bad for America.
Susan Crabtree of the Washington Free Beacon has a lengthy report on just how hard Pelosi worked to save $54,000 by taking a tax break that Trump’s bill repealed.
Here’s how it worked. Pelosi’s “assets and cash disclosed in her 2016 financial-disclosure statement places [her] in the top one-tenth of the 1 percent of Americans” and she in reality wasn’t going to give up her tax breaks without a fight.
The property tax bill on her three of her mansions comes to a stunning $137,000. A figure that is more than twice the 2016 U.S. median income. The California portion of that bill, when deducted from her income due the IRS, gave her a tax break of $64,000. Trump’s tax cut bill that supposedly represents “theft from the middle class” limits Pelosi’s tax break to a total of $10,000.
Instead of being happy about the extra money Pelosi would be sending to Washington, she rushed to pre-pay her property tax before January 1, 2018, to try and take advantage of her loophole one last time.
I don’t know about you, but I see a disconnect between Pelosi’s insulting language regarding the tax bill and her behavior.
The fact is the Heritage Foundation “found that only 34 percent of tax filers in the state claim the [Pelosi’s] deduction.” The average deduction claim for Nancy’s millionaire buddies was $462,503, with the middle class she claimed to be so worried about only had an average $7,931 claim, which was still allowed in total under the new tax bill.
The word hypocrite is thrown around too easily in Washington these days, but it’s hard to find another descriptive term for a politician that claims a tax cut punishes the middle class, when in truth it leaves them unaffected and only costs the rich woman doing the complaining.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.
Michael R. Shannon is a commentator, researcher for the League of American Voters, and an award-winning political and advertising consultant with nationwide and international experience. He is author of "Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times (Now with added humor!)." Read more of Michael Shannon's reports — Go Here Now.