Perhaps it's just me, but there's something highly intrusive about asking someone to make their tax returns public. It ranks right up there with the famous "boxers or briefs" questions. The appropriate response to my mind is, none of your business.
After the primaries of this past Tuesday, Senator Obama is coming back swinging, since he feels that's how he himself got hit, and the latest strident demands from his campaign are that Senator Clinton make public her (2006) tax returns. Senator Obama started vocalizing on this theme shortly after the Clinton campaign announced in earlier weeks that their candidate had indeed loaned herself $5 million for campaign use out of the couple's joint funds, as though he was mystified at how she could afford such a loan (while his own experience at writing best selling books should inform him to the contrary). Senator Clinton, for her part, is quick to respond that she and her husband liquidated their investments going into her campaign, to avoid any conflict of interest.
The press release from the Obama camp yesterday makes some weary attempts at humor. As Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times notes in her blog yesterday, the Obama campaign protests as follows, "Senator Clinton has claimed she is 'too busy' to release her tax returns. Given the fact that she is able to loan her campaign $5 million, you would think the Clintons would be able to hire an accountant."
As former residents of the White House, the Clintons made public their tax returns several years in a row. But it's no state secret that the bulk of their wealth has come in their post-White House years, where both have published best-selling books with hefty advances, and the former President has been engaged in consulting and public speaking ventures worldwide.
The Obamas have released their 2006 tax return, which is not being widely publicized. It reveals that Mrs. Obama, a hospital administrator, is now making over $300,000 a year in her job at a Chicago hospital and that they had a total reportable gross income of almost $1 million in 2006 (a drop from about $1.6 million in 2005), not bad for a junior senator who touts living on "the south side." Almost half of that came from income from his two best-selling books, which no doubt has skyrocketed since his foray into presidential politics. Mrs. Obama's income jumped over $200,000 when her husband was elected to the Illinois State Senate.
If the argument they are trying to make is one of financial transparency, it's a hard case to make against people who released their financial information every year for over eight years to the American public. If the argument is that people will reject candidates who are doing well financially, it's unlikely their house is any less glass than his jaw.
