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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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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