"Only the little people pay taxes"

Despite gorging themselves on record profits, corporate CEOs are getting away with paying no taxes and robbing employee pensions to fund their $400 million retirement packages….

But on this customary tax day (15 April), it puts this most burdensome duty of US citizenship into perspective if one knows that many rich people believe that “Only the little people pay taxes” – as Leona Hemsley, perhaps the most infamous CEO in America (after the crooks at Enron) once said.

NOTE: VP Dick Cheney has become such a reviled figure in American politics – with poll numbers even lower than President Bush’s – that it would not surprise me to see the Democrats produce talking points characterizing his charitable donation of almost $7 million (from the $8.8 million he earned last year) as a blatant attempt to assuage his guilt by washing his hands of the blood money he got, after cashing-in deferred shares, from Halliburton. After all, many of his partisan critics have argued for years that Halliburton won no-bid contracts to profit from the war in Iraq only because Cheney is its former CEO and retains finanacial interests in the company via deferred stock options.

filing taxes