America's Richest Taxpayers See Federal Taxes Dramatically Drop

WASHINGTON -- As millions of procrastinators scramble to meet Monday's tax filing deadline, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.

The top income tax rate is 35 percent, so how can people who make so much pay so little in taxes? The nation's tax laws are packed with breaks for people at every income level. There are breaks for having children, paying a mortgage, going to college, and even for paying other taxes. Plus, the top rate on capital gains is only 15 percent.

There are so many breaks that 45 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax for 2010, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

"It's the fact that we are using the tax code both to collect revenue, which is its primary purpose, and to deliver these spending benefits that we run into the situation where so many people are paying no taxes," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the center, which generated the estimate of people who pay no income taxes.

The sheer volume of credits, deductions and exemptions has both Democrats and Republicans calling for tax laws to be overhauled. House Republicans want to eliminate breaks to pay for lower overall rates, reducing the top tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. Republicans oppose raising taxes, but they argue that a more efficient tax code would increase economic activity, generating additional tax revenue.

President Barack Obama said last week he wants to do away with tax breaks to lower the rates and to reduce government borrowing. Obama's proposal would result in $1 trillion in tax increases over the next 12 years. Neither proposal included many details, putting off hard choices about which tax breaks to eliminate.

In all, the tax code is filled with a total of $1.1 trillion in credits, deductions and exemptions, an average of about $8,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent watchdog within the IRS.

More than half of the nation's tax revenue came from the top 10 percent of earners in 2007. More than 44 percent came from the top 5 percent. Still, the wealthy have access to much more lucrative tax breaks than people with lower incomes.

Obama wants the wealthy to pay so "the amount of taxes you pay isn't determined by what kind of accountant you can afford."

Eric Schoenberg says to sign him up for paying higher taxes. Schoenberg, who inherited money and has a healthy portfolio from his days as an investment banker, has joined a group of other wealthy Americans called United for a Fair Economy. Their goal: Raise taxes on rich people like themselves.

Shoenberg, who now teaches a business class at Columbia University, said his income is usually "north of half a million a year." But 2009 was a bad year for investments, so his income dropped to a little over $200,000. His federal income tax bill was a little more than $2,000.

"I simply point out to people, `Do you think this is reasonable, that somebody in my circumstances should only be paying 1 percent of their income in tax?'" Schoenberg said.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said he has a solution for rich people who want to pay more in taxes: Write a check to the IRS. There's nothing stopping you.

"There's still time before the filing deadline for them to give Uncle Sam some more money," Hatch said.

Schoenberg said Hatch's suggestion misses the point.

"This voluntary idea clearly represents a mindset that basically pretends there's no such things as collective goods that we produce," Schoenberg said. "Are you going to let people volunteer to build the road system? Are you going to let them volunteer to pay for education?"

The law is packed with tax breaks that help narrow special interests. But many of the biggest tax breaks benefit millions of American families at just about every income level, making them difficult for politicians to touch.

The vast majority of those who escape federal income taxes have low and medium incomes, and most of them pay other taxes, including Social Security and Medicare taxes, property taxes and retail sales taxes.

The share of people paying no federal income tax has dropped slightly the past two years. It was 47 percent for 2009. The main difference for 2010 was the expiration of a tax break that exempted the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits from taxation, Williams said.

In 2009, nearly 35 million taxpayers got a tax break for paying interest on their home mortgages, and nearly 36 million taxpayers took the $1,000-per-child tax credit. About 41 million households reduced their federal income taxes by deducting state and local income and sales taxes from their taxable income.

About 36 million families cut their taxes by nearly $35 billion by deducting charitable donations, and 28 million taxpayers saved a total of $24 billion because their income from Social Security and railroad pensions was untaxed.

"As a matter of policy, there would be a lot of ways to save money and actually make these things work better," said Leonard Burman, a public affairs professor at Syracuse University. "As a matter of politics, it's really, really difficult."

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Chris Christie Support For Hypothetical Presidential Run Back Home

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is often mentioned as a presidential contender, but fewer than one in four voters in his home state would back him as a candidate, a poll released on Thursday said.

Two-thirds of registered voters "oppose Chris Christie for president in 2012," according to the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll.

Fewer than half of Republicans and a quarter of independents support Christie as a candidate, the poll found.

"This does not mean a future try would be opposed, just that New Jerseyans aren't joining the national media's storyline that Christie could take the nomination in 2012 if he wanted it," said David Redlawsk, director of the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll and professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Christie, a former prosecutor, has been seen as a rising Republican party star since taking office last year and pushing a lean-government, low-tax agenda. But he has said he did not think he was ready to be president and did not plan to run in 2012.

New Jersey voters are unconvinced the buzz surrounding the governor's political future is good for the state, the poll found.

Nearly two-thirds of those polled said having a governor on the national stage makes no difference or hurts the state's image, while a third of voters said it was a good thing for New Jersey.

The poll of 773 registered voters was conducted from March 28 to April 4 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

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At The Local Level, Tea Party Activists' Skepticism Turns To Anger On Budget Deal [UPDATE]

Gauging what the Tea Party thinks about any given topic is always difficult, since there is no real centralized leadership and even the nationally known groups have limited connections to the grassroots.

But the reaction to the budget deal being voted on in Washington Thursday--from Tea Party activists organizing at the local level here and in other places around the country--was universally negative.

"The [continuing resolution] was Washington as usual. We elected Republicans because we were tired of the behind-closed-door antics of the beltway boys and four months in we are right back where we started," Andrew Hemingway, a 28-year-old small-business owner and the chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, told The Huffington Post.

Hemingway has quickly become a sought-after Tea Party leader, with Republican presidential hopefuls ranging from former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) requesting audiences. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was set to meet with Hemingway on Thursday for about 20 minutes, and he is organizing the meeting Monday between Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) and activists.

"This CR was a joke and I expected more of Speaker Boehner," Hemingway said. He added that Pawlenty, in opposing the budget deal, "is standing with the American people and I am proud to stand with him."

Much of the Tea Party was skeptical of the deal when it was reached Friday night, with House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) office trumpeting $38.5 billion in spending cuts. But as the exact number of those cuts has come into question, skepticism has turned into disappointment and anger.

"I wasn't happy with the outcome last Friday night and am far less so after all this began to come to light. The disingenuous nature of this deal is staggering and seems to be just more business as usual in Washington," said Doug Mainwaring, a real estate agent and local conservative activist in Bethesda, Md.

Mainwaring told HuffPost that "Boehner and the Republican leadership have frittered away a lot of the leverage they had."

"I'm not sure they have the political willpower to accept the mandate that was handed them from the Tea Party last November," Mainwaring said.

Jim Carley, a Tea Party activist and retiree in Des Moines, Iowa, told HuffPost that Republicans should have made Democrats vote against deeper spending cuts, "and you can hold them to the fire the next election."

"But how do you hold them accountable when you are the one that caved?" he said.

National Tea Party groups were equally displeased.

"The deal was cut in a back room, announced without specifics, members supported it without specifics and without reading the bill (shocking, right?), and now it turns out not to be even as it was vaguely presented. Sickening," said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots.

"And amidst all this, Speaker Boehner proclaims that there is 'no daylight' between he and the Tea Party. If he actually believes that, he must have his eyes closed," Meckler told HuffPost.

But even among the grassroots, there was a recognition that bigger fights over the debt ceiling and the fiscal 2012 budget should become the focus of the GOP now, marking a willingness to swallow the weak tea that the budget deal for the current fiscal year now represents for them.

Bob MacGuffie, a conservative Tea Party activist in Connecticut, said the debt ceiling and the 2012 budget are "the main event."

"This is the fight worth having," MacGuffie said. "We want to engage in a ferocious battle over the debt ceiling and 2012 budget--bring it on--we'll give the Republicans a spine by holding our bayonets firmly at their backs."

UPDATE: 3:30 P.M. -- The budget deal passed the House by a comfortable margin, by a vote of 260 to 167. A total of 59 Republicans voted against the deal, but according to ABC's Jon Karl, only 27 of those no votes came from freshman House Republicans, who comprise the bulk of the conference's Tea Party component.

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Scott Walker Defends Hobbling Unions

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker defended his school of union hobbling as a route to fiscal discipline to budget-weary Washington on Thursday, telling a House committee that protracted, nail-biting negotiations in tough economic times can produce inaction and bad policy.

"Sometimes," the Republican governor told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, "bipartisanship is not so good."

Walker clearly was speaking of recent Wisconsin budget history. Still, it was an extraordinary message to deliver to Capitol Hill at a time of divided government, when leaders in Congress realize they have little choice but to negotiate the path toward the nation's economic stability. As Walker spoke to the House panel, a Congress facing tough fiscal battles ahead was preparing to send the White House a bipartisan deal for $38 billion in spending cuts over the next six months.

"This is the best we could get out of divided government," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters.

Walker's budget for Wisconsin is just the opposite – an explicit act of partisanship.

Passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and now the subject of a court fight, it ends collective bargaining on everything except wages for state and local government employees and requires them to absorb more of their pension and health care costs. The state no longer will collect dues for unions through paycheck deductions.

Walker's assault on the public employee unions roiled Wisconsin politics, inspiring widespread protests and a walkout by Senate Democrats in the legislature. It also made him a hero to many conservatives and a favorite ideological target of Democrats, for whom unions are a key and well-funded constituency.

Former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is set to attend a tea party rally this weekend at the Wisconsin Capitol, the site of recent protests over legislation that would strip union rights for most public workers. The Wisconsin Democratic Party says in a statement that Palin and Walker complement each perfectly because each wants to lower wages and benefits for Wisconsin families.

The bitterness followed Walker to Washington on Thursday. The hearing, billed by Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., as a look at the choices faced by budget-strapped local governments, was more a coming-out for the Republican governor.

The Democrats' witness, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, began his testimony by giving his fellow governor a bottle of maple syrup – a prop, as it turned out, for Shumlin's point that "you can get more with maple sugar than with vinegar."

Governors all must balance their budgets, Shumlin, a Democrat, said, and most do it without sparking the kind of animosity roiling Wisconsin.

"You can get this job done, you can balance your budget, you can create jobs in your state without taking on the basic right of collective bargaining," Shumlin said. "If you want to go after collective bargaining ... just come out and say it."

Walker told the House committee he had tried for years as a local government official to negotiate with public employee unions, only to reach no accord. He complained that past state budgets amounted to bipartisan raids on specific funds, questionable accounting principles and agreements to put off tough decisions. He said his budget will plug that deficit.

Democrats at Thursday's hearing were combative.

Just how much did weakening government workers' collective bargaining rights save the state of Wisconsin? demanded Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

"That particular part doesn't save any," Walker replied. Earlier in his testimony, he told the committee the changes would save local governments in Wisconsin more than $700 million a year.

He has said the part of the bill that forces the workers to contribute more toward their pensions and health care saves the state $30 million this fiscal year and $300 million over the next two.

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who represents the District of Columbia, asked Walker whether he's met with union representatives since the bill passed. Walker said no, but a member of his administration has.

Norton suggested Walker should take a lesson on civility from Congress, of all places. Though she often disagrees with Issa, for example, "I have always felt that this was somebody I could talk with and we could have a civil conversation."

In your shoes, she told Walker, "I would want to take the high road."

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New Health Care Advocacy Group Launches With $5 Million In The Bank (EXCLUSIVE)

The newest health care advocacy campaign already has millions of dollars in the bank. Launched by Democratic lawmakers and reform proponents, the two-part program is meant to frame the debate around the law during the 2012 election cycle.

On Thursday, Gov. Deval Patrick (D-Mass.), former Gov. Jim Doyle (D-Wis.) and several Democratic operatives launched the latest variation of a pro-health care, non-governmental organization. The project has a dual track: a 501c(3) group, called “Know Your Care,” to promote the Affordable Care Act, and a 501c(4) group, “Protect Your Care,” to lobby on the law's behalf.

The project already has a healthy fundraising stream, a source familiar with the campaign told The Huffington Post.

The $5 million launch figure gives an early indication that the organization will succeed where other health care advocacy groups have failed: primarily, in turning the tide of public and political opinion in the law’s favor.

In addition to the money, Know Your Care brings some high-profile names to its staff: Patrick and Doyle will serve on the board. Neera Tanden, who worked on President Obama’s health care task force team, will be on the board as well; Paul Tewes, Obama’s state director for the Iowa caucuses, will serve as senior adviser; Tanya Bjork, a former top adviser to Doyle, will serve as campaign manager; Jim Margolis, a top ranking communications consultant, will serve as the group’s media adviser; Eddie Vale, a former top hand at the AFL-CIO, will be communications director; and John Anzalone, a major Democratic pollster, will do the polling.

“Our efforts here are to really to make sure that this is a factual debate and that the facts are out there,” said Doyle. “It is critical that people understand what the benefits of this act are, and I look forward to making sure those facts are known across the country.”

How the organizations will structure their operations or spend their money isn’t entirely clear. Officials at the launch were coy with strategy and plans, stressing only that Know Your Care and Protect Your Care will be informative in nature, will be active in races and will work through the 2012 election until the major components of the law are implemented in 2014.

Only the 501c(4) organization can engage in lobbying -- so long as it pertains to the organizational mission -- but neither side of the operation has to disclose its donor names.

“The rules are the rules,” said David Donnelly of Public Campaign Action Fund, a group that promotes ethics in government. “We want to change them. There some groups who feel like they have to disclose their donors, [...] there are others that choose not to. The problem comes if they start pushing the boundaries on tax law, spending more money on electoral work than issue advocacy.”

The new campaign has the luxury of working on an issue that seems likely to remain firmly in the political spotlight. The president’s health care reform is already a fault line in the 2012 Republican presidential primary.

Obama advisers insist the legislation passed by in Massachusetts by former governor -- and potential GOP candidate -- Mitt Romney (R) was the intellectual foundation for the Obama administration’s own law. Fellow Republicans have insisted that Romney will end up having to either apologize or better explain his role in the Massachusetts legislation. But for now, he provides Know Your Care and Protect Your Care with the type of hook that they can use to make their campaign a bi-partisan one.

“If people are attacking Mitt Romney for his health care plan,” said the source familiar with the group’s efforts, “we would defend Mitt Romney and his health care plan.”

On Thursday, Patrick previewed the type of line that could inevitably come from his new organization.

“I give Governor Romney genuine and sincere credit for his role in working with a Democratic legislature, a Democratic U.S. Senate, a Republican White House, a broad coalition of business and labor leaders and patients’ advocates and experts in the medical field who came together to invent our health care reform,” said the current Massachusetts governor. “And, frankly, that broad coalition -- I guess with the exception of Governor Romney -- has stuck together to refine it.”

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Well Aware Of Bubble, WaMu Boosted Bad Loans, Report Finds

Top executives at Washington Mutual actively boosted sales of high-risk, toxic mortgages in the two years prior to the bank's collapse in 2008, according to emails published in a wide-ranging Senate report that contradicts previous public testimony about the meltdown.

The voluminous, 639-page report on the financial crisis from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations singles out Washington Mutual for its decision to champion its subprime lending business, even as executives privately acknowledged that a housing bubble was about to burst.

"I have never seen such a high-risk housing market," CEO Kerry Killinger wrote in a 2005 email to his chief risk officer. "This typically signifies a bubble."

Nonetheless, in a series of memos over the next two years, Killinger told board members that the bank should accelerate its subprime portfolio as part of a major growth strategy.

The internal memos detailed in the report are a stark contrast to Killinger's testimony last year before the same Senate subcommittee, where he said that by 2004 the company "quickly determined that the housing market was increasing in its risk, and we put most of those strategies for expansion on hold."

The report finds Washington Mutual continued its aggressive foray into high-risk lending because of the "gain on sale." When repackaged and sold to investment banks as securities, higher-risk loans would yield more profits for the bank.

One chart presented to the bank's board in 2006 showed that selling subprime loans could generate eight times as much profit as lower-risk, government-backed loans.

One of the largest and most aggressive issuers of subprime mortgages in the country, Washington Mutual eventually collapsed in September 2008 -- the largest bank failure in U.S. history. It was eventually purchased by J.P. Morgan Chase as part of a deal brokered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

The FDIC last month sued Killinger and two other top executives at Washington Mutual, accusing them of reckless management of the company and seeking damages in the millions. An attorney for Killinger did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

The report issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the subcommittee on investigations, also excoriated the Office of Thrift Supervision, the government body tasked with regulating Washington Mutual and numerous other failed lenders that aggressively pushed shoddy loans.

"Over a five-year period from 2004 to 2008, the (Office of Thrift Supervision) identified over 500 serious deficiencies at WaMu, yet failed to take action to force the bank to improve its lending operations," the report noted.

In several cases, the office impeded investigations by the backup regulator, the FDIC.

In one case, in 2006, numerous banking regulators had determined that adjustable-rate mortgages, which had upfront low monthly payments that eventually increased dramatically, were at major risk for default. Regulators issued new guidance to banks, saying they needed to consider the higher interest rates -- not the initial "teaser" rates -- before approving borrowers for loans.

But a summary of a meeting between Washington Mutual officials and regulators showed that the Office of Thrift Supervision viewed the rules as "flexible," and emphasized "should" instead of "must."

By late 2006, the FDIC discovered that Washington Mutual was not complying with the new standards, but the Office of Thrift Supervision blocked any further FDIC review, refusing to give access to loan files.

Using the delay to its advantage, the bank continued to issue billions of dollars of high-risk loans. A 2007 e-mail from Ron Cathcart, the bank's chief enterprise risk officer, implied that the delay was strategic: new requirements for income verification would cut the volume of new adjustable-rate mortgages by a third.

"When WaMu failed in 2008, it was not a case of hidden problems coming to light," the report concludes. "The bank's examiners were well aware of and had documented the bank's high risk, poor quality loans and deficient lending practices."

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Larry Summers: Don't Blame Financial Innovation For Crisis (VIDEO)

Depending on who you ask, regulation is either a hindrance to the global economy or our only hope against global economic collapse. Safe to say Larry Summers, who played a pivotal role in deregulating the financial markets during the Clinton administration, tends to favor the former category.

At the Bretton Woods conference over the weekend, sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Summers, who resigned last year as director of Obama's National Economic Council, defended complex financial instruments against criticism that they played a central role in dragging the global economy into its current recession.

"I am in less of a hurry to condemn the [financial] innovation as the cause of the crisis than many," Summers said, because "most financial crises [in the past] do not seem to have their roots in new-fangled financial institutions." Instead, he said, it's probably better to blame the housing bubble.

In the wake of the worst largest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, the financial services industry has come under intense scrutiny for its ever-increasing reliance on complex financial instruments like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, relatively recent innovations that critics say has created a high-risk, prone-to-collapse economy.

Summers, however, said he wouldn't institute more financial regulation than necessary, implying in the interview that overly-ambitious attempts could lead to more corporations like government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two companies he contends "were the site of the greatest degree of irresponsibly" during the crisis.

Speaking at length about the competing ideologies surrounding regulation, Summers distinguished between one side worrying that regulators will become "co-opted" by a conflict of interest, and the other afraid regulators are simply "ignorant" of the institutions they are charged with controlling. "There is hardly anyone," Summers said, "that is both knowledgeable and [sic] unco-opted."

"The truth is," Summers continued, "regulators haven't done a terrific job."

As Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration, Summers was a key figure in an effort to relax regulations on derivatives that spread risk throughout the financial sector. In 1999, Summers praised the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, originally meant to control financial speculation, as a step toward creating "a [financial] system for the 21st century." Later, according to a former top official at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Summers said derivative regulation could potentially cause "the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."

On Tuesday, the accuracy of Summers' comments may have been undercut by a report by the Economic Policy Institute entitled "Regulation, Employment, and the Economy: Fears of Job Loss are Overblown," with the housing crisis being one of three major areas of focus in the paper.

Instead of discussing whether regulations unnecessarily impede the economy, however, EPI focused on the statistically negligible job losses occurring as a result of regulation, noting in the press release that only 0.3 percent of all job losses were the direct result of regulation between 2007-2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2007 alone, when the national unemployment rate was 4.6 percent, still only 0.3 percent of jobs were lost because of regulation:

EPI also criticized the methodology of past government reports studying the costs of regulation to the overall economy, finding one study, for example, where 13 of 21 predictions had been "significantly" overstated, while under 3 of 21 had been understated.

Every year, the Office of Management and Budget runs a cost-benefit report on government regulations, comparing the cost of slowing down business against the economic and social benefits of the regulations. In every year between 2000-2010, the benefits of regulation outweighed the costs mightily, on average by roughly 700 percent. The ratio is especially startling in the middle years of the decade:

Watch :

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'All My Children', 'One Life To Live' Canceled By ABC

ABC has canceled two of its longest-running programs, daytime soap operas "All My Children" and "One Life to Live."

The network announced Thursday that the two soap operas would end, with "All My Children" going off the air in September and "One Life to Live" going off the air in January.

In their place, a Mario Batali-hosted food show called "The Chew" will premiere in September, and a health/lifestyle transformation show tentatively called "The Revolution" will premiere in January.

"General Hospital" will remain on the network.

"All My Children" has been the subject of cancellation rumors of late, with Deadline.com's Nellie Andreeva reporting last month that the show might be replaced by a talk show.

"While we are excited about our new shows and the shift in our business, I can't help but recognize how bittersweet the change is," Brian Frons, ABC's daytime department president , said in an announcement. "We are taking this bold step to expand our business because viewers are looking for different types of programming these days. They are telling us there is room for informative, authentic and fun shows that are relatable, offer a wide variety of opinions and focus on 'real life' takeaways."

In an exclusive interview with The Huffington Post's Lucas Kavner, Frons noted that he certainly expects some backlash. "I haven't had a chance for anybody to physically assault me yet," Frons said. "But if you're a passionate viewer of these shows, you can assume people are going to be really angry at me."

Frons added: "Like a lot of forms on TV, when there's a hit, a lot of people jump on a bandwagon. But then you end up in season 25 of the Real World," he said. "Maybe we’re just at that point where only the best survive."

The first of the new shows to premiere, "The Chew," will be hosted by Batali, "What Not To Wear" host Clinton Kelly, "Top Chef" alumna Carla Hall, restaurateur Michael Symon and "Dorm Room Diet" author Daphne Oz.

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Tracy Morgan, On 'The View,' Denies Stuffing Crotch In '30 Rock'

Tracy Morgan will do anything for a laugh, but one thing he doesn't do? Stuff his pants. No need, he says.

Morgan appeared on "The View" on Thursday to promote his new film "Rio," and appropriately, he was sitting next to his "30 Rock" wife and "View" co-host Sherri Shepherd. When the talk turned to their hilarious turn as on-screen couple, Shepherd showed a clip and made quite an outrageous accusation.

"Every time he came out, he would stuff something in his pants," Shepherd said, referring to one of Morgan's many, many shirtless scenes.

Big mistake.

"That wasn't stuffed!" Morgan insisted. "That's me. You know I'm magically delicious. I don't create nothing but stalkers!"

Turns out, he also makes Sherri Shepherd blush.

WATCH:

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