This isn’t new news. The ‘Rev’ has owed the IRS huge sums of money for years. Here’s a story from — cough — NBC News’ website in 2008 detailing the $1.5 million owed by Sharpton personally and his “business entities” at the time.  At the end of 2011 (by which point Sharpton had been hired as a host on NBC’s cable “news” network) Sharpton’s unpaid tab had swelled to nearly $3 million.  Three more years have since elapsed, so it’s time for an update (via the New York Post):

The Rev. Al Sharpton, along with his nonprofit National Action Network and two for-profit firms, have $4.7 million in outstanding debt and liens, according to federal and state tax records, the New York Post reported on Sunday. Among the debts include $806,875 that Sharpton owes the state, along with $2.6 million in federal liens against him for unpaid personal income taxes, the Post stated. Recent filings showed the National Action Network owed $813,576 to the federal government at the end of 2012, and his company Rev-Al Communications owes $447,826 to the state, while the Bo-Spanky Consulting firm has $18.21 in outstanding debt, according to the Post.

Sharpton — a prominent hoax perpetrator, race riot fomenter, and alleged drug trade-enabler-turned-FBI informant — insists the actual sum he owes is “significantly less” than public records indicate, and that the debts are “being paid down.”  The MSNBC host is, naturally, an ardent advocate for raising taxes on “the rich.”  Here he is holding forth on wealthy people’s duty to “sacrifice,” and (deliciously) attacking Mitt Romney for, er, not paying enough in taxes:

Between federal and state taxes and charitable giving, Mitt Romney has surrendered approximately 39 percent of his adjusted gross income over the last two decades. He’s paid every penny owed to Uncle Sam — and then some; liberals actually groused that he overpaid his taxes in order to bump up his effective tax rate, depriving them of a juicier class warfare talking point. Al Sharpton, a fellow millionaire, has been massively delinquent on his tax bills for years.  It’s impossible to overstate the shamelessness of that second clip.  Meanwhile, Sharpton is hardly scraping by.  To the contrary, he’s living the high life, seemingly unperturbed by his dizzying debts.  From Jonah Goldberg’s withering 2013 column:

If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the Vanities today, he’d need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It’s an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called the “Masters of the Universe” — the super-rich gods of finance who today go by the name “the 1 percent.” Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.Named by Business Insider as one of the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple. Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could afford it, I’d join. The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al Sharpton’s membership? “The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club. After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to show his solidarity with the 99-percenters. The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he claimed he didn’t have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn’t own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access” to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.

This man appears on television every night to demagogue the successful, push for tax hikes (on people who actually, you know, pay their taxes), bellow about “fair shares,” and assail law-abiding Republicans for not forking over sufficient percentages of their money — all while offering his “insights” on “racial justice,” or whatever.  I can’t even.