The Collegian
Thursday, March 28, 2024

A Call For Tax Code Reform

The first few weeks of the Obama presidency have been marked by both triumph and embarrassment. From the left's perspective, Obama triumphed in enacting a gargantuan spending bill that is supposed to pull our economy out of its current doldrums. The passage of this bill marked the first of what liberals hope are many legislative victories for the new administration. The embarrassment came in the form of several high-profile nominees and their inability to pay taxes properly.

Timothy Geithner "forgot" to pay $34,000 in self-employment taxes due from his years spent working at the International Monetary Fund. Of course, the Treasury Secretary's faux pas was dismissed by Democrats as an "honest mistake" as they maintained that the man wasn't purposely trying to skip out on tax payments. Luckily for Geithner, the dire financial situation gave him the needed boost to propel his confirmation through Congress.

Sen. Tom Daschle was not so fortunate. Daschle achieved the seemingly impossible -- he made Geithner's mistake look miniscule. Daschle's tax scandal included upwards of $130,000 in unpaid dues. The press and Capitol Hill were less forgiving to the Health and Human Services nominee resulting in his eventual withdrawal from the nomination.

Many Republican commentators and politicians saw an opportunity to go head hunting. The howls came from the right bemoaning the irony of Vice President Joe Biden's months-old election statement insinuating the patriotism associated with tax payment. The conservative chorus rang: Why Joe, if taxes are so patriotic, then doesn't that mean the Obama administration itself is unpatriotic because some of your nominees skipped out on payments?

Taking a step back from the immediate tendency to revert to partisan mockery, I realized that I could find room in my heart to forgive monsieurs Geithner and Daschle. Heck, I will even believe that they made "honest mistakes." In fact, it is extraordinarily easy to see how such mistakes could be made given our country's ridiculously convoluted tax code. Currently, the U.S. tax code is an unfathomable 65,000 plus pages long. No wonder so many tax problems occur in our country each year, resulting in the ballooning tax gap.

Geithner has been described by some as the only man capable of understanding the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). He furthermore has been almost universally heralded as one of the premier financial minds in the country. If such a beautiful mind (and new head of the IRS) cannot understand the many intricacies of our tax code, who can? Last September, Rep. Charlie Rangel, one of the main authors of our nation's tax code, had tax payment issues of his own. Nothing screams tax code reform like the realization that our treasury secretary and top tax writer both proved incapable of filing their taxes correctly.

Many on the left have remained vehemently opposed to tax reform. This continues to perplex me as liberals have long anointed themselves as the champions of the poor and underprivileged. Geithner, Daschle and Rangel all enjoyed the advantage of accountants to help with their taxes, and they still slipped up. Lower-income Americans have fewer resources and are left to face the beastly tax code alone. Many Democrats have also cried foul about the growing "tax gap" in our country (the difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid). What better way to shrink this gap than to simplify paying taxes and thus eliminate many of the mistakes made by innocent Americans who find themselves in similar situations to Geithner, et al?

As a conservative, I am willing to smile and wink at these recent tax indiscretions- on the condition that our politicians move multilaterally to confront the villain that they themselves created. Tax code reform is needed now, so in the future we will not once again be faced with the unenviable situation of having to distinguish between a mistake and a "mistake."

Contact reporter Jarrett Dieterle at jarrett.dieterle@richmond.edu

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