Image via YouTube
Kentucky Senator and GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul on Tuesday released a video of himself eviscerating a copy of the US tax code with a chainsaw, and a few hours later, he reportedly paid a delinquent property tax bill in Florida.In the video titled "How Would You Kill the Tax Code," Paul — wearing a t-shirt that says "Detroit Republican" — announces that he's "trying to kill the tax code — all 70,000 pages of it," and replace it with a one page code and a 14.5 percent flat tax. In a montage, he shows himself burning the tax code, throwing it into a wood-chipper, and slicing it with a chainsaw, as an electric guitar plays the national anthem.Shortly after Paul released the video, the Kentucky Herald-Leader newspaper noticed that Paul himself had an outstanding property tax bill of $2,489 for a condo in Destin, Florida. According to Senate financial-disclosure forms, Paul and his brother-in-law David Ashby bought the condo together in 2007. The tax bill had been delinquent as of March 31.The Herald-Leader contacted the Paul campaign about the outstanding bill early on Tuesday, and just a few hours later, the local tax collector in Florida confirmed to the newspaper that the bill had recently been paid.This latest video is not the first time Paul has vowed to attack the tax code. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in June, he promised to "blow-up the tax code and start over." Paul called his plan an "economic steroid injection" that would also cut 2 trillion dollars in taxes and create 1.4 million new jobs.