And, that makes three. It’s unclear how serious “Chief Performance Officer” Nancy Killefer’s problems with the IRS are. She may have been pushed to withdraw given the aggregate public relations hit the Obama administration is taking due the revelation that NO DEMOCRATS PAY THEIR TAXES. When Obama announced the newly created post- part of OMB- to much ado, the administration envisioned her job as one that would “help put us on a path to fiscal discipline” by making government more efficient.
Well, government would certainly have to be more efficient if we all paid our taxes like Democrats do. Chuck Todd posits that Killefer is withdrawing her nomination because her close work with the IRS as a Clinton administration assistant Treasury secretary, dictates a zero-tolerance policy on taxes. But if that’s the case, wouldn’t the guy who is supposed to run the Treasury Department be subject to the same rule? Add Al Franken and Charlie Rangel to the count, and you’ve got a veritable all-star team of tax cheats. These people are the Ted Haggards of taxes, and they should be pilloried in much the same way. They preach about “shared sacrifice” and the patriotism of paying taxes, and yet they conveniently forget about to pay taxes on their chauffeur services, international properties, and entire jobs when calculating their own sacrifices. I doubt Killefer will be the last one to pay for her tax sins. Even the NYT is not defending Tom Daschle:
Nor should they be defending him. The NYT, Daschle, and the entire Obama administration is proposing to bring the American people a trillion in economic “stimulus,” much of which is made up of spending on their pet projects. Those pet projects will be funded by those Americans who do pay their taxes, and may very well be paying more in taxes under an Obama administration. The tax cheats Obama nominated should have to pay a personal price for their failures, and Obama’s big-spending ambitions should have to pay the price for the disturbing number of powerful Democratic officials who fail to live up to the standards they set for the rest of us. This sounds like a great jumping-off point for a discussion of tax code simplification. Right, Republicans?
