How dumb is Sen. Richard Burr? This dumb. He's raising personal income taxes as an issue in his re-election campaign against Deborah Ross.
Burr said that if Ross obliges and releases the summary sheets, “in a show of transparency” he would make public summaries of his state and federal tax returns dating to 2004 when he first won his Senate seat. A campaign spokesman, Jesse Hunt, said Burr was speaking about the first two pages of each return.
But here's the thing.
Burr has never released his tax returns during his 22 years in Congress.
He's also fully embracing that other guy who has so famously refused to release his tax returns: Donald Trump. The senator's spokesman "declined to respond to a question as to whether Burr feels Trump, whom the senator has endorsed, also should release his tax returns."
Even without Burr's tax returns, we know that he's become rich while in Congress, because he's had to release financial disclosures. He had an estimated net worth of $2.6 million in 2014, and has held "stock in Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy, Loews Corp. Waste Management Inc., Transocean Ltd., and Nucor Corp., all energy companies lobbying Congress for energy and regulatory bills which Burr has cosponsored."
So by bringing up this story, Burr is opening himself up to the question of why he hasn't released his taxes in the past 22 years, and reopening the story of the wealth he's gained through his position in the Senate. Wealth that he's voted to protect, being one of just three senators to vote against the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act back in 2012. You might remember it. It was designed to prevent Members of Congress and their staff from trading stocks based on information they gleaned from congressional briefings and their official duties. So Burr voted against stopping his own potential insider trading while he owned hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock in energy companies and while he was authoring legislation helpful to that same industry.
And now he just reminded everyone of that again, that he’s gotten really rich as a result, and of the fact that he hasn't released tax returns in the whole of his congressional career. I guess he really is that dumb.
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