What is it about Democrats not paying taxes? Especially high-profile Democrats in office. The amount of arrogance in thinking they won’t be caught is astounding to me.
Any way you slice it, $287, 273 is a lot of money, especially in this economy. For one-term Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., up for re-election in 2012, that’s the amount of personal property taxes she failed to pay since 2007 on a plane she and her husband, a millionaire businessman, partially owned.
"I have discovered that the…personal property taxes on the plane have not been paid," McCaskill told a small number of reporters on a conference call Monday. "There should have been a reporting to the county of the existence of this airplane…There are people I could blame for this, but I know better. As (a former) auditor, I know I should have checked for myself. I take full responsibility for the mistake." …
The senator had used the plane for political purposes paying for the travel with taxpayer money from her Senate office, a "mistake," the senator said, for which she reimbursed the government nearly $89,000. "All of the money has been repaid for the public funds," McCaskill said Monday. An aide to the senator clarified later that only "a small sliver" of that money was actually used for political travel but that the senator had "gone above and beyond" what was required in her repayment "out of an abundance of caution."
McCaskill said she had paid sales taxes on the plane, both local and state, evidence, she said, that she had made no attempt to duck her financial responsibility. "I want to reiterate, there was no attempt to evade the plane…This is just a mistake that I take full responsibility for."
But Republicans did not buy the explanation from McCaskill, a top GOP target in 2012. "In the past two weeks, we have learned that Claire McCaskill billed taxpayers for political travel and failed to pay nearly $300,000 in personal property taxes on her plane. Over the last four years, cash-strapped school districts and the children in these schools have been deprived of these much-need funds," Missouri Republican Party chairman David Cole blasted in a statement from his office.
Teabagging The Left 