Obama's Aides Owe Some Money in Back Taxes
A few dozen people who work for President Obama are having some trouble paying their taxes.
The IRS has released its Federal Employee and Retiree Delinquency Inventory, and it shows that 36 of Obama's aides owe a total of $833,970 in back taxes.
Other government employees owe a lot, too. At the Environmental Protection Agency, 413 people owe more than $19 million; at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which is supposed to "maintain stability and public confidence in the nation's financial system," 185 employees owe more than $3 million; and five people at the U.S. Tax Court owe $62,508.
Obama has repeatedly called on the rich to pay more taxes to help lower the deficit. He has used the billionaire investor Warren Buffett as a poster child, saying that under the "Buffett rule," people making more than $1 million a year should pay a 30 percent tax rate.
"We need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes," Obama said in his State of the Union speech this week. "Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense."