Today in news that you could not possibly make up but that we somehow should have completely expected: The IRS alleges that Donald Trump’s new nominee to sit on the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Moore, currently owes the government more than $75,000 in taxes.
A claim for the debt was filed against Moore by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in January last year at the circuit court in Montgomery county, Maryland, where Moore has a home.
Court records state that Moore, a former Trump presidential campaign adviser, owes the US $75,328 for taxes incurred in 2014. A court clerk confirmed the claim filed by the IRS had not yet been satisfied by Moore.
In a statement, Moore said he disputed the IRS claim. He said he was “eager to reach an agreement” with authorities but had been frustrated by bureaucracy at the revenue service.
The guy tapped for a seat on the Federal Reserve says he’s “frustrated by bureaucracy.” Nice! Certainly he has other qualifications for the job?
Per the New York Times, to which Moore recently insisted that he wasn’t a sycophant:
Mr. Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic adviser to Mr. Trump, is a relatively unconventional choice for the job. He has made his name largely by championing tax cuts, not monetary policy, and he is pushing an unorthodox theory on how the central bank should set interest rates.
Here’s the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, responding to Moore’s claim that he wasn’t a sycophant:
Moore has spent the past three years serving as surrogate, spin doctor and sycophant for President Trump, on TV and in the press. Moore suggested in the Times interview that he praises and promotes Trump merely because they “think a lot alike on a lot of things” and “share a lot of the same economic philosophy.” That might be true for their mutual love of tax cuts. But in service to Trump, Moore has also regularly abandoned many of the other issues in his “economic philosophy” he’d reliably advocated pre-Trump. Once a warrior for free trade, Moore now regularly defends Trump’s tariffs. Until recently a champion of undocumented immigrants, he now rails against them.
Starting to get an idea of why this guy got the nod!