January 13, 2009

Only the UnAnointed People Pay Taxes

Continuing the passing parade of embarassing Obamic appointments, the One's nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, is in a bit of hot water. As it turns out, he failed to pay thousands of dollars in self-employment tax for several years -- in the 2000s; and despite an IRS ruling in 2006, he continued to fail to pay them (plus interest and penalties) until scant days before he was nominated by Barack H. Obama, after the transition team discovered Geithner's little faux pas:

Timothy Geithner paid most of the past-due taxes days before Obama announced his nomination in November, an Obama transition official said. The unpaid taxes were discovered by Obama's transition team while investigating Geithner's background, the official said....

Geithner failed to pay self-employment taxes for money he earned while working for the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003, the transition official said. In 2006, the IRS notified him that he owed $14,847 in self-employment taxes and $2,383 in penalties from 2003 and 2004.

Transition officials discovered last fall that Geithner also had not paid the taxes in 2001 or 2002. He paid $25,970 in taxes and interest for those years several days before Obama announced his nomination, the transition official said.

Geithner can hardly plead honest ignorance (as Leon Piñata might argue, when he inevitably makes some boneheaded mistake as CIA Director); Geithner has had a long career in financial circles, including fourteen years at Treasury, culminating with a three-year stint as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs; and he has been President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since 2003. One would think that he would have a competent accountant doing his taxes by this point... or would at least had learned how to run TurboTax, which handles SE tax quite nicely (as I know from personal experience).

Was it the late and unlamented Leona Helmsley who was reputed to have said, "Only the little people pay taxes?" I have no idea what were her politics, but she should at least be named an honorary Democrat.

In the present case, Geithner joins former Commerce Secretary designate Bill Richardson -- withdrew due to a corruption investigation he forgot to mention to anyone -- and the aforementioned Mr. Piñata, named CIA Director despite having no intelligence experience whatsoever, on the grounds that he's really good at political infighting (politicization of intelligence, anyone?)

(Of course, Obama has made a few very good appointments; but they all seem to have been appointed by George W. Bush -- and retained by the president-elect.)

You'd think that someone who has focused virtually every waking moment upon making himself president, by hook or by crook -- rather than doing anything that would actually merit his election -- would have spent at least a smidgen of that effort selecting nominees who don't have any Zoe Baird-like scandals dangling over their heads.

But of course, being liberal means never having to say you're sorry -- if anybody was inadvertently offended by well-intentioned mistakes that were made in an environment of the economic devastation and Constitution shredding wrought by eight years of the Cheney-Rove regime.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 13, 2009, at the time of 3:46 PM

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