Cornel West Owes More Than Half a Million in Unpaid Taxes

Veteran Ivy League professor and bestselling author Dr. Cornel West has long advocated for taxing the rich to provide more services to America’s lower classes. But the academic-turned-Green Party presidential candidate isn’t living up to those standards in his own life—as public records from New Jersey and California show, West owes the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes.

West’s lament of the concentration of wealth among the nation’s elite and his support for fiscal policies that would funnel funds down the social scale have been an enduring theme of his decades-long career as a public intellectual—from his initial appearances on the national scene in the 1990s, to his support of both of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential bids, to his current sally along the 2024 campaign trail.

"Taxation without representation is now reflected in policies that allow the wealthy to be coddled and under-taxed while the perennially poor, working poor, and 'new poor' are ignored and rendered invisible,” West and co-author (and alleged sex pest) Tavis Smiley wrote in their 2012 book, The Rich and the Rest of Us. “Economic justice in America has been overshadowed by greed, because unequal taxation benefits the rich at the expense of everyone else.”