Tax Returns: Obama, Clinton, McCain

02 April 2008 |permalink | email article

Financial disclosure has emerged as a defining issue in the countdown to the presidential election in November. Transparency does matter.

Barack Obama, one of the Democratic finalists who previously released his 2006 tax return, last month released seven years’ worth of tax filings which indicate that his income has soared with his celebrity.

The disclosures put increased pressure on Hillary Clinton, with 10 remaining primaries, to do the same and also provide a list of all donors to President Clinton’s presidential library.

Clinton, who promised to release her income tax returns during the general election, has had second thoughts, saying last week she expects to release her returns “shortly.”

The secretive Clintons have not released their tax returns since leaving the White House in 1991. Their wealth has drawn recent attention since Hillary Clinton’s decision to loan $5 million of her own money to the campaign early this year.

She reported income of as much as $12 million on her latest Senate disclosure form filed last May, and more than $10 million of that came from President Clinton’s speaking fees.

The Clintons have not agreed to make public a list of contributors to the Little Rock presidential library or of Sen. Clinton’s “earmark” spending requests – something Obama did last month.

The Wall Street Journal reported John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has never released his own tax returns and whose wife, Cindy Hensley McCain, is chairwoman of the nation’s third oldest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorship. Will McCain now also make public his returns?

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