ARNOLDS PARK, Iowa —A question about the credit union tax exemption was posed to one of the Democratic candidates for president.
During a town hall in Iowa, hosted by Mayor Pete Buttigieg at which approximately 100 people were present, Buttigieg gave most of his standard stump speech with comments on the climate, gun control, the economy and other typical issues.
But then Buttigieg was asked an unusual question for a presidential candidate when one audience member asked him whether he would end the federal income tax exemption for credit unions, claiming CUs no longer serve the same purpose as they did when they were create, according to the Globe.
Buttigieg did not answer the question directly. Instead, he called for a quintupling of credit for compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act (which is not applicable to most credit unions), and then said federally chartered organizations should be required to fulfill the community services for which they were designed, according to the Globe.
“The other thing that really fires me up about who’s paying more taxes," Buttigieg was quoted by the globe as saying, "is you and I also paid more taxes last year than Amazon did — on billions of dollars of profit. Chevron — matter of fact, they paid negative taxes. I don’t even know how that works, but I know that that’s wrong, because they make billions and billions of dollars of profit.”