Sarah Palin May Have To Pay Income Tax On All Those Fancy Clothes

In the tank ABC reporter Jake Tapper has spoken to a purportedly "well-respected" tax attorney who believes that Sarah Palin will have to declare that $150,000 worth of fancy convention clothes as income, because her excuse that they were "borrowed" from the RNC is kind of, well, wrong.

Palin's situation is not like that common thing that you women always do, where you borrow each others' dresses for special occasions and then return them afterwards. Sarah Palin is not, say, borrowing a dress from the RNC's closet because she shares the same size with it and/or the RNC had already worn that dress to Prom the week before and OBVS can't wear it in public for at least like another year; that would beso embarrassingfor the RNC and it would lose all of its friends. It's more like Sarah Palin wore the RNC's dress and got wine or semen all over it, so what's the point of returning it?:

"It's probably not a 'gift,'" he said. "The issue is whether it counts as 'income.'"

Palin's claim that the pricey duds belong to the RNC and she's just "borrowing" them and will return them later, reminds him, he says, of some of the issues going on in the prosecution of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. (Some of the issues, he specified, not the allegations of criminality.)

"This is exactly the issue with the Stevens case," he said. "When you loan something to someone can you call it a 'loan' if, upon its return, it has no practical value?

"The consensus view is she would have to count the wardrobe as income at least in the amount of the fair value of the rental of the wardrobe," he said.

Because who's going to wear this RNC dress after Sarah Palin returns it, anyway? Whichever random lady vice presidential candidate who emerges to an avalanche of mockery in 2012? No no, we know Palin well enough to know that she's trashy enough to keep this junk after she loses. She'll wear it around the house everyday in Alaska while chugging boxed blush wine and murmuring into space about lipstick; her hair completely disheveled with little Piper, there in the background, scrubbing out her mother's red-and-yellow vomit stains from the carpet.

Oh, and that's a fancy expensive scarf she's wearing in the accompanying photo. It's covered in donkeys, the symbol of the Democratic party.

 Tax Expert: Palin Has to Declare Clothes [ABC News]

Photo via Fishbowl LA