Why do presidents and candidates bother to release tax returns?

By David McElroy · April 16, 2012

Cleaning out the notebook…

Since Richard Nixon set the modern precedent in 1969, almost every president has released his tax returns. Even candidates do it. Is it just a coincidence that the president who started the tradition is the only one so far to resign in disgrace?

I can’t figure out what presidential tax returns are supposed to prove. If I’m a president engaging in financial hanky-panky, I’m not going to report the illicit income on my tax returns. So what exactly is the point? Does anybody know?

By the way, Nixon was the first to do it in the modern era, but Franklin Roosevelt did it for years during his (almost) four terms in office. After Nixon started doing it in ’69, Gerald Ford is the only president who hasn’t done it. If I were a candidate, I wouldn’t do it, but that’s probably just one more of the many reasons why I’d never be a candidate.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’m still constantly amazed at the lengths to which some people will go to make everything into a political issue. I saw several tweets over the weekend similar to this one: “Obama presides over biggest sex scandal in Secret Service history.”

I’m certainly no fan of Barack Obama, but he just happened to be president when this scandal involving Secret Service agents and prostitutes happened. It’s political demagoguery to blame this sort of thing on a president who isn’t responsible, but happened to be in office — whether that president is Obama or Bush or anyone else. It’s intellectually dishonest.

We’ve become so accustomed to star athletes being jerks that it seems almost like the norm, so I’m always happy to see stories such as this one. Former University of Alabama running back Trent Richardson is expected to be among the top 10 picks in the upcoming NFL draft, possibly going as high as the fourth pick. He’s going to be an immediate multi-millionaire and doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone. I’ve always gotten the impression that he was a decent human being, but my respect for him went up this weekend when he took a 17-year-old girl to her senior prom.

Courtney Alvis is lucky to be alive. She’s a senior at Hueytown High School, which is in a lower middle-class suburb of Birmingham. She was diagnosed with leukemia last year and spent a good part of her junior year fighting the cancer as she went through chemotherapy. She’s survived, though, and wanted to make it to her senior prom, but no one asked her. She’s a big admirer of Richardson and he found out about her situation. Richardson’s own mother is a cancer survivor, so he decided to take Courtney to her prom.

ESPN’s SportsCenter has a nice story that’ll make you happy that some athletes are still decent human beings.

With this being tax season, an accountant passed along an important tip to me over the weekend. Here’s a story about a woman who’s rescued 70 cats and takes care of them. She tried to deduct the costs of their care as a charitable deduction, but the IRS wouldn’t allow it. She went before a tax law judge, though, and she’s won her case.

I have no idea why this guy thought this story could possibly be of interest to me, but I have to admit that the thought is starting to occur to me that I should deduct the full cost of operating my home as an animal sanctuary for abandoned critters.

Education is very important to me, but I’m skeptical about the effectiveness of many organized systems of schooling. I ran across a quote this week from Winston Churchill that expressed my views on the subject. I hope it doesn’t seem too cynical for you:

“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education. They are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.”

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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