Top Tea Partier, Husband, Owed IRS Half A Million Dollars

[babylonsister]

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/10/top_tea_partier_husband_owed_irs_half_a_million_do.php?ref=fpa

Top Tea Partier, Husband, Owed IRS Half A Million Dollars
Zachary Roth | October 8, 2009, 2:36PM


A top activist with the anti-tax Tea Party movement has had a personal brush with federal tax collectors. Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder and national co-ordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, owed, with her husband, over half a million dollars to the IRS when the pair filed for bankruptcy last year, according to filings examined by TPMmuckraker.

The couple's bankruptcy filing, made in August 2008 to the US Bankruptcy Court for Georgia's Northern District, stated that Martin and her husband Lee Martin, of Woodstock, Georgia, owed the IRS $510,000, after making a payment of $16,640 that June. The couple also owed just over $71,000 to Ford Motor Credit, the automaker's financing arm.

snip//

Martin, who has worked in the past as a GOP consultant in Georgia, has been a prominent face of the Tea Party movement, making television appearances and speaking to reporters.

She hasn't hidden her and her husband's financial woes, portraying them as evidence that she speaks for ordinary Americans affected by the economic downturn. She told USA Today that when she got involved with the Tea Party movement, "we had just lost our house and had ... moved into the rental house." The paper reported that "Lee's temporary-employee firm had 5,000 workers before it went down in the recession." Said Jenny Beth: "I didn't want other people paying for my mortgage, and I wanted to prevent that in other places," she says.

And in an interview the couple gave to Fox News around the same time, Jenny Beth said: "We've been hit by the financial crisis and the recession, and we are like everyday Americans."

But the bankruptcy and the debt to the IRS was mentioned in neither appearance.

[gratuitous]

1. Why are they against taxes? They don't pay them . . .

"I didn't want other people paying for my mortgage." Instead, she's not paying her own mortgage, so where does she think that expense goes? To the Magic Planet of Mortgage-Paying Purple Unicorns? If she's not responsible for her own debt, somebody somewhere is, in the form of higher interest rates, larger down payments, or lower salaries at the mortgage company.

And, just for the sake of reference, owing half a million dollars in taxes doesn't make you "like everyday Americans," Ms. Martin. It makes you a fraud and a deadbeat.

[lpbk2713]

2. Friends of Zell and Newt, no doubt.

"... has worked in the past as a GOP consultant in Georgia"

[SpiralHawk]

6. Republicon Family Values

Ptooooey.

[madrchsod]

3. everyday americans do not have a 510,000 dollar tax lien

everyday americans do not make that much in ten years to have a 510,000 dollars in taxes

[SpiralHawk]

4. Typical Republicon -- a Latter Day Pharisee Hypocrite

Ptooooey on the Honor-free Republicon Pharisees.

[Warren Stupidity]

5. I'm tempted to pay to get the bankruptcy filing.

The PACER system contains electronic filings for federal bankruptcy cases. Registration is free but there is a $0.08/page charge and I have no idea what I would be getting into. Anyone have access already?


https://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/psco/cgi-bin/register.pl

The case is somewhere in the northern georgia bankruptcy court, august 2008.

[hadrons]

7. "has worked in the past as a GOP consultant in Georgia" ... they fought for the policies that ....

put them in the poor house.