I was wrong about Abrams for SOTU rebuttal

Stacey Abrams

Poetrooper is back with some more well timed thoughts on Stacey Abrams, and her suitability as a poster child for the Dems. This nicely follows yesterday’s SOTU transcript link. So, without further ado..

Poetrooper
I was wrong about Abrams for SOTU rebuttal
Last week I wrote here questioning the Democrat leadership’s political wisdom in picking Tracy Abrams, their recently defeated Georgia gubernatorial candidate, to deliver the party’s rebuttal speech to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address. I pointed out that Abrams is no poster child for responsible behavior, especially when it comes to her finances—she’s a tax attorney turned tax evader who has run up huge balances on her credit cards and may be a deadbeat on her college student loans. Today I discovered, thanks to an article by Jason Hopkins, writing at the Daily Caller, that Ms. Abrams has other financial issues that I failed to discover. He writes:

Third Sector Development, a nonprofit started by Abrams that focuses on registering black voters, was hit with three separate tax liens in the past year for failing to pay state unemployment tax, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Tuesday. The three tax liens, filed by Georgia state regulators, total roughly $3,500.

This isn’t the first time state regulators have targeted Abrams’ organization. The Georgia Department of Labor issued four tax liens worth $13,000 against Third Sector Development between 2014 and 2016, also citing unpaid employment contributions.

But what was even more interesting was that Abrams had been generously compensated by Third Sector Development, which she founded and headed, as well as another get-out-the-minority-vote non-profit, also an Abrams creation, the Voter Access Institute, to the tune of almost a half million dollars in a three year period. That hefty salary was funded out of $12.5 million in donations from sources Abrams refuses to reveal, a quite unusual stance for non-profits to take when their operations are aboveboard.

According to a September 2018 Daily Caller report by Hopkins, Abrams’ highly-paid efforts to get out the minority were less than a rousing success:

The non-profits accomplished little in reaching their implicit goals, despite the large amount of money involved. The Georgia Democratic Party only received 3 percent more votes in the 2014 gubernatorial election than in 2010. Black voter turnout actually declined by more than two percentage points.

Apparently Ms. Abrams couldn’t manage her non-profit agencies any more successfully than her personal life. During her 2018 run for governor, the true extent of her debt was revealed, and was again reported on by Hopkins at Daily Caller in this July 2018 piece:

Abrams owes back taxes amounting to $40,201 for 2015 and $13,851 for 2016. She owes $96,512 in student loan debt and another $77,522 in credit card debt spread over nine different accounts. In total, she is about $228,000 in the red. This number is actually higher if you count her $178,500 in real estate debt and her $4,434 car loan.

Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, has blamed a misunderstanding in her younger years of how credit card debt works and a temptation as a business owner to spend revenue instead of withholding it for tax collection. She has also cited family obligations as a major reason for debt, having helped pay for her father’s cancer treatment.

With arrogance that only a liberal Democrat can muster, Abrams actually attempted to squeeze lemonade from this bag of rotting lemons, trying to convince voters that having made such a mess of her own personal finances made her better qualified to manage the fiscal affairs of Georgia because so many voters struggle with debt. But as Hopkins pointed out, assuredly not on the scale of Stacey Abrams, whose student loan debt is three times the national average while her credit card debt is five times that average. He also noted that Abrams has managed to accrue all these negative balances in spite of being well-compensated for many years, having stepped into a $95,000 annually salaried job as soon as she graduated from law school.

What I’d really like to know is precisely how much of Abrams’ debt is attributable to her father’s cancer treatment—if significant, I’d be inclined to be more charitable in my assessment of her. But if she’s cynically using her father’s illness as a dodge—which I’m just cynical enough to strongly suspect—then she’s despicably dishonest as well as fiscally foolish. In other words Stacey Abrams can check all the boxes to qualify for Democrat leadership: she’s a dishonest, black, female graduate of an Ivy League law school, a tax evading advocate of big government taxing and spending, thoroughly grounded in the concept of personal deficit spending. I will probably draw fire for this, but I’m just cynical enough to suspect that the Democrat suits, being even more cynical, also saw Abrams’ plus-size figure as a plus, what with obesity being endemic in many minority communities. Lastly, Abrams is a proven loser in multiple ways who still has the chutzpah to stand before huge audiences and spout silly Democrat talking points with a reasonably straight, if somewhat comical, face—in other words, the perfect Democrat to deliver the SOTU rebuttal.

I was wrong last week—in picking Abrams Democrat leaders knew exactly what they were doing–for once.

Another thought provoking article, follow the money. Thanks, Poe.

Category: Guest Post, Politics