Taxing Issues

Tom Daschle has hit a snag in his appointment to head HHS. Apparently he has had to correct his tax filings for the last three years and is paying around $130,000 in back taxes and interest (no penalties). He somehow forgot to account for his use of a free limo and driver for this period of time. (I think he has also had tax problems in the past associated with a vacation home he owns in North Carolina.)

Tim Geithner, just shamelessly confirmed to head our Treasury Department, has also had to pay self-employment taxes for 2001-2004 when he worked for the IMF. After these oversights were found, he had to pay back taxes and interest (no penalties) of $43,200. (Even though Geithner was re-imbursed by the IMF for the taxes he hadn’t paid, President Obama labeled this an “innocent mistake”.)

Representative Charlie Rangel also failed to report some $75,000 in rental income from vacation properties he owns in the Dominican Republic. He will (someday) be filing amended returns. It is expected he will owe the IRS thousands of dollars. Strangely he also has paid no interest on the mortgage he used to buy this property … weird? (He heads the House committee that writes our tax code.)

There are many, many more politicians who face IRS scrutiny, Ted Stevens from Alaska and William Jefferson from Louisiana to name but two … maybe even Christopher Dodd if he ever gets around to disclosing the terms of his sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide Finance.

Therefore, my solution to our rapidly growing national deficit is for the Internal Revenue Service to give all politicians of any stripe a colonoscopic audit of their tax filings for the last five years. The money that they would recover should be monstrous. But wait, since Geithner is now head of the Treasury Dept. under which sits the IRS, this seems somewhat unlikely to happen.