When Stacey Abrams was running for Georgia governor, she had an impressive list of social changes she wanted to make. People paying their bills didn’t make the cut.
Abrams was $228,000 in debt during her 2017 campaign for Georgia governor, including $50,000 to I.R.S. Despite that, she managed to loan her campaign $50,000. She also owed $76,000 in credit card debt and $96,000 for Yale Law School.
Abrams claimed that family obligations and a misunderstanding of how credit cards worked as the reason for her financial mess. This from a woman who is a tax attorney who wanted to be the vice president of the United States.
Abrams claims the concept of handling money seemed to escape her. She wrote that when she was at Spelman College, she got her first credit cards but was unaware that they would be “yoked to something called a credit score.” She also learned that if you don’t pay your rent, you get evicted, the way she was in 1994 from the Oaktree Apartments in Decatur, GA like she and her sister, Andrea, did.
In a continuing effort to blame others for her failings, Abrams claimed some of her financial problems stemmed from when she helped her parents in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi. She is one of six children, including a sister, Leslie Abrams Gardner, who was appointed to a federal judgeship by Barack Obama. How did her parents’ debt become only hers to carry and how was it still around twelve years later in 2017, especially when she was able to loan her campaign $50,000?
Abrams, a tax lawyer, who graduated from Yale in 1999, with $96,000 in student loan debt owed, still had repaid none of it almost twenty years later when she ran for governor. She even got jammed up by the I.R.S. in 2010 when she declared her parents as independents on her tax filing.
She justified this in an interview:
“Abrams, 44, has talked publicly about her struggles with mounting credit card debt dating to when she was a student at Spelman College. And she said she "stretched every penny I had" to help her parents after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005.
“She cited those expenses in her decision to work out a payment plan for the $54,000 she owes the IRS. She’s also said a previous federal income tax lien of nearly $30,000 was filed erroneously in 2010 when she was trying to claim her parents as dependents as they faced mounting medical issues.
"While delaying tax payments wasn't my smartest move, it allowed me to take care of the parents who'd sacrificed so much for me and my siblings..."
She neglected to mention that when she was hired out of law school in 1999 by a law firm in Atlanta, Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, that paid her $95,000 a year, but Abrams she still wasn’t paying her bills.
On Abrams’ Financial Disclosure Statement filed for her run for Georgia governor, Section X shows she listed receipts of $909,006.89 in money received from twenty different companies.
