McCain releases tax returns — at least, some of them

April 18, 2008

For all the talk in recent weeks about Hillary Clinton’s initial reluctance to release her tax returns, John McCain’s identical reluctance has gone largely ignored. The difference is that the media devoted considerable attention to Clinton’s returns, and gave McCain a pass on his.

The good news is, McCain finally released his tax materials today. The bad news is, he’s chosen to be less than forthcoming.

John McCain made nearly $420,000 in taxable and non-taxable income in 2007, according to the Arizona senator’s tax returns just released by his presidential campaign.

McCain’s 2007 income includes his approximately $162,000 Senate salary, over $176,000 in book royalties, $23,000 in Social Security income, and over $58,000 from his Navy pension.

The filing does not include his wife Cindy’s much larger income — the two have long filed separate tax returns.

Hmm. The Clintons released returns for both Bill and Hillary. The Obamas released returns for both Barack and Michelle. But Cindy McCain’s tax materials will remain private.

I have a hunch I know why.

The Wall Street Journal noted yesterday that McCain’s second wife is very, very wealthy.

She heads one of the nation’s largest beer distributorships, an Anheuser-Busch Cos. franchise inherited from her father. She has sported “MS BUD” on her license plate, and from the campaign trail she uses her BlackBerry and cellphone to oversee this region’s rollout of Bud Lite Lime and to expand her corporate empire. […]

In 2000, when Mrs. McCain’s father died, she inherited the beer distributorship…. Mrs. McCain assumed her father’s position as chairman…. Since James Hensley’s death eight years ago, the distributorship has nearly doubled, holding a significant portion of the Phoenix-area market share. It has 700 employees and annual revenue of about $300 million. Mrs. McCain has approved the buyout of another distributorship, helping bring sales last year to 23 million cases of beer.

Mrs. McCain (who can tell a beer’s freshness by tasting it, according to her daughter Meghan) declines to say what percentage of the company she owns or its value. Industry experts estimate her stake at about $100 million.

She owns a private jet, which Sen. McCain’s campaign pays to use on the trail.

You know, someone might even be tempted to call the McCains “elites.”

To be sure, are Cindy McCain’s tax returns especially significant? Not really. In fact, I’m not surprised that someone of her wealth would want to keep her returns free of scrutiny.

But it’s worth noting that in 2004, the Republican National Committee spent quite a bit of time and energy demanding that the Kerry campaign release Teresa Heinz Kerry’s tax returns.

The situation is comparable. John Kerry made less money than his wife, who inherited most of her fortune. The McCains are in a similar boat. In 2004, Teresa Heinz Kerry resisted calls for disclosure, just as Cindy McCain is now. Republicans insisted that all materials, relating to Kerry’s income and his wife’s, be publicly released, and the Kerrys ultimately agreed. Will Cindy do the same?

In other words, if we hold the McCains to the standards set by the Republican Party, today’s disclosures by McCain are inadequate and incomplete. We’ll see if the media chooses to follow up.

Great – now whomever wins democratic nominee (both shillary and obama’s returns indicate they made millions), the lying liars in MSM will report that mclame is “one of us” – an income of less than 1/2 million.

This will be used to distract from the fact mclame is flagrantly violating campaign finance laws – watch out for the catapulting propaganda.

  • McCain’s trophy wife will get a Really Free Ride.

    But can we please get a look at the donors to the Clinton’s various organizations now, or do we have to wait ’til after Hillary’s done with her Republican ad campaign?

    NEW YORK — As Chinese authorities have clamped down on unrest in Tibet and jailed dissidents in advance of the 2008 Olympics, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken a strong public stance, calling for restraint in Tibet and urging President Bush to boycott the Olympics opening ceremonies in Beijing.

    But her recent stern comments on China’s internal crackdown collide with former President Bill Clinton’s fundraising relationship with a Chinese Internet company accused of collaborating with the mainland government’s censorship of the Web. Last month, the firm, Alibaba Inc., carried a government-issued “most wanted” posting on its Yahoo China homepage, urging viewers to provide information on Tibetan activists suspected of stirring recent riots.

    Alibaba, which took over Yahoo’s China operation in 2005 as part of a billion-dollar deal with the U.S.-based search engine, arranged for the former president to speak to a conference of Internet executives in Hangzhou in September 2005. Instead of taking his standard speaking fees, which have ranged from $100,000 to $400,000, Clinton accepted an unspecified private donation from Alibaba to his international charity, the William J. Clinton Foundation.

    The former president’s charity has raised more than $500 million over the last decade and has been lauded for its roles in disaster response, AIDS prevention and Third World medical and poverty relief. But his reliance on influential foreign donors and his foundation’s refusal to release its list of donors have led to repeated questions about the sources and transparency of his fundraising — even as Hillary Clinton has talked on the campaign trail about relying on him as a roving international ambassador if she is elected president…

    http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-clintonchina13apr13,1,2958700.story

    So our “roving international ambassador” will be bought and paid for by huge international interests, and we’re not supposed to even see who’s been giving him what. But Obama is elitist.

  • It would be shocking if they ever played by the rules they expect Democrats to follow. We can complain all we want, but we will never see the returns. And any comments and excuses we hear (if they even bother to try) will be insultingly lame.

  • So let me get this straight; he makes $162,000 for being a Senator…but at the same time he brings in entitlements worth $61,000/year. An argument could be made for the Navy pension, but he’s collecting Social Security to the tune of nearly $2000/month. There are a whole lot of people in this country living on wages of less than his social security benefits. They’re trying to raise kids and pay the bills, while he’s siphoning off their pre-tax wages…after collecting a healthy salary from the treasury.

    Seems to me that some of these Senators could probably work for free and put a little more servitude into public service.

  • McCain’s 2007 income includes his approximately $162,000 Senate salary, over $176,000 in book royalties, $23,000 in Social Security income, and over $58,000 from his Navy pension.

    Triple dipping??? And he’s not even showing up for his day job (Senate) half of the time??? Sheesh… Small comfort but, at least, his book (books?) seems to be less popular than Obama’s 🙂

  • McCain’s 2007 income includes his approximately $162,000 Senate salary, over $176,000 in book royalties, $23,000 in Social Security income

    If we’re so damn serious about fixing (again!) social security, I see two damn good ways to do it: take off the caps, period! And stop paying it to people who are wealthy. Jeebus H, it’s supposed to be a safety net. I don’t give a damn if people paid into it all their lives, it’s not like it’s a savings account. That’s just a sham that’s been used to make people feel better about getting nailed for the tax all those years. What it is is a system to keep retired people, vulnerable dependents, disabled, etc. from going hungry or homeless, to be able to live with a decent lifestyle and not be dependent on others. If you’ve got an income of over $100,000 a year, you shouldn’t get SS, period. Can you imagine how much money would be saved by doing that? Can you imagine how much could be brought in by taking off the caps? Problem solved. Was that so hard?

  • lindsay – the republicans and faux dems that lie about a “crisis” in Social Security have no interest in preserving it – the interests they represent never supported it in the first place.

    If they had legitimate concerns, they wouldn’t lie about it – using “worst case” scenarios to predict calamity (and even then misrepresenting their misleading projections) while using “best case” (read: totally unlikely) returns in the private-sector vehicles that they would like to channel savings to.

    Rule #1. People that have sincere interests in solving problems & helping others do not LIE to do it.

  • It appears that his Navy pension of $58,000 and his S.S. pension of $23,000 are not considered double-dipping. That’s odd, since two similar pensions (Federal and S.S.) are regarded as double-dipping and one’s S.S. pension is always substantially reduced. There must be an exception because of his military service, or maybe it’s a loop hole given to senators, but $81,000 a year in pensions ain’t bad. It probably helps to finance those barbecues for the press.

  • Go look at the returns! Fascinating!
    $28 interest income
    $0 capital gains
    $0 dividend income

    Any assets are hidden somewhere else.

    OT: Why does a beer distributor attend a southern
    baptist church?

  • Little Bear: All complexity aside, it would be so refreshing if we could just honestly discuss this whole SS thing in the public square for what it is, and start using it as the safety net it was supposed to be. If we quit giving it to those who really demonstrably don’t need it, like McCain, that would save a huge amount of money. (And, by the way, if one is married to a wealthy spouse but files separately, that shouldn’t be a way around it, unless you’re estranged.) And actually I wouldn’t just advocate, if I were king, removing the caps. I would simply create a truly progressive income tax and fund SS from that. And capital gains? That would just be income, taxed at whatever rate you happen to fall in. Why should it be any different? Income is income. Whether you make it by making shrewd investment decisions or digging a ditch, it’s money you’ve got coming in. If we’re going to have an income tax, then tax all income, period. And fund all the entitlements out of the kitty. This business of having separate tax rates for different types of income and separate taxes for SS and medicare and such is just chicanery to advantage the rich over the poor, in one way or another. I’m so fed up with these shell games I could spit.

  • By NOT releasing his wife’s income, like the other candidates have done with their spouses’ incomes, it makes John McCain look like he’s hiding something!

  • “My life has not been one of privilege and luxury. I had the great honor of serving in this country,” McCain has said.(exerpted from the article at CNN.Politics about the release of his tax returns but not his wife’s).

    What a pile of horseshit. Exactly what does the first statement have to do with the second? Not a damn thing, but apparently everything that trips off his tongue has to be followed by a reminder of his “service to his country” If he refers to it many more times I may have to LEAVE the country.

    Johnny, let us let you in on something: you’re not the only one who has served your country in the military. Perhaps due to your advanced age and doddering ways, that point has escaped you.

    You seem to believe that you should be awarded the presidency because you were a POW. I don’t pretend to even imagine how awful that time was you, but I do know, you came home alive — more than 53,000 of your fellow service men and women did not. Thousands more did not come home from Korea, from the Pacific theater of WWII, from the trenches and battlefields of WWI. Thousands more suffered unspeakable, unbearable torture from mustard gas, the Bataan march, and other ways our enemies came up with to inflict misery on their fellow human beings.

    The families of the more than 4,300 servicemen and women who have died in Iraq are not coming home, yet you want to continue to throw more of our sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, cousins, uncles into that free-for-all bloodbath because…. I forget. Oh, that’s right, to save the people of Iraq (from themselves). No, wait a minute — not the PEOPLE, we need to save the OIL for Bushwhacked and your other GOP cronies.

    THOUSANDS OF LIVES wasted on a waste of our time and money on a country that will fall 42 seconds after we pull our last serviceman out (of course we know THAT will never happen) right back into the same warring ways they have klived under for thousands of years.

    A billion dollars a week — how many starving children would that feed in our own country? How many people living in rat-infested apartments could instead be provided basic humane shelter for the three TRILLION dollars — $3,000,000,000,000 — this war will cost? How many schools could it build? Librairies? Parks? Hospitals? Homeless shelters? Soup kitchens?

    It’s insulting for all of those who made the ULTIMATE sacrifice — and their families — for you to continue to publicly congratulate yourself about YOUR, much smaller sacrifice. It’s insulting to people who live — if one can call it living — far below the poverty line while you talk about the microscopic percentage of vast wealth that you so publicly “give” — donations which go not to your own countrymen, but to foreign lands…. to clear landmines.

    What magnanimous generosity. You’re worth at least $36 million, your wife $100 million, and you have the balls to brag about giving a quarter of it to charity — your own charity! — after collecting your $58,000 pension PLUS $23,000 in social security.

    Anyone else wonder what’s wrong with this picture? Does anyone else wonder what 3-4 families could do with $81,000 between them, which is mere pocket change to the well-fattened McCain clan?

    Your a greedy pig just like the rest of the poltiticans under whose “representation” the rest of us 235 million or so ordinary citizens toil, sacrifice, labor and suffer 24/7.

    You sacrificed for five years before returning home to a a posh life amidst luxurious surroundings. More than 4,300 men and women aren’t ever coming home, and more than 50,000 didn’t come home from Vietnam — you did. Millions of people right here in the U.S.of A., the country you profess to love, suffer a lot longer than five years — many of them their entire lives — because pompous, arrogant, self-serving, self-righteous, nitwits like you have the audacity to meddle in the affairs of governments, and then send someone else’s kids to go fight your wars.

    God forbid we should ever put another one of your ilk into the White House, or any other position with more responsibility than taking out the garbage. You don’t have a clue as to what the American people want or need, and you certainly aren’t willing to listen. Our government is supposed to represent “we the people,” in case you’ve forgotten.

    Quit wrapping youreself up in the flag and pontificating about your service to your country. The only service you should do for it now is to hobble off to a reitrment home and regale your new neighbors with that tired “Service to My Country” saga. It will be much less painful for them — your peers — than the rest of us, ’cause they can’t hear so well anymore.

  • A couple of things strike me.

    One, McCan’t is a worse book writer than Barack, Bill or Hillary.

    Two, we should start the meme going around the Kerry lost because his wife makes more money than him, then stick that meme on John McCan’t.

  • Was the John and Cindy McCain Foundation returns included? Want some insight about their donations in the past few years? Go to Ken Silverstein’s piece in Harper’s last month. Now THERES some revelations for you.!! Almost all of the money in the foundation was from book sales,,PLUS-the charitable donations were to their pet charities-namely their own children’s elite private schools ( wriiten off their taxes)-but only $250.00 to Phoenix Crisis Center for abused and runaway kids.Can you spell Double Talk Elitist Express??

  • Wow a guy who donated a quarter of his income to charity last year. Sounds really generous doesnt it? Problem is that the money went to the John and Cindy McCain Foundation. If you look at the tax returns for the McCain Foundation for the last seven years you find $500,000 in donations to:

    Xavier College Preparatory
    Brophy College Prep
    Christ Lutheran School

    What do these private schools have in common?
    Why they are all private schools that his children attend or have attended.
    The Senator is taking tax breaks supporting elite private schools for his kids.
    All Perfectly Legal but….

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