Byron York explains why there has been a seeming rash of Obama nominees with tax problems. Contrary to Obama administration accusations, there is no difference in how the Senate Finance Committee is approaching such nominations. As before, they're asking for three years of past tax returns and examining those returns for problems. When problems have been found, as before, the nominee is informed. The difference is how the administration and nominees have chosen to respond to those findings. Senator Grassley, the ranking member of the committee, has pulled back the curtain a bit.
“The tax issues of the nominees considered by the committee this year came to be public only because the nominees chose to proceed.”
Grassley said the committee has always requested three years of tax returns from nominees, and always employed experts to review them. And in the past, he added, “many nominees” faced questions based on their tax returns. The reason tax problems seem more prevalent now, Grassley explained, is that in previous administrations those nominees chose to quietly withdraw. Now, they try to stick it out, leading to sometimes embarrassing controversy. “Chairman Baucus and I agree that if a nominee chooses to proceed after tax issues are identified, then the public should be informed of those issues,” Grassley said.
Remember that the Obama people knew all about Tim Geithner's tax problems and decided to go ahead anyway. They figured that, in the current economic situation, the Senate and the public would just sigh and sign on to their nominees. They gambled that Obama's popularity was so high that they could withstand such stories. But it turned out that they overestimated what the public was willing to accept from the new administration. And sending a bunch of people with tax problems to work in the administration while the public is facing such economic anxieties.
I asked a Senate source close to the nominating process why the troubled nominations kept coming, in spite of the tax problems. “I think it was the administration underestimating what the grassroots folks who elected President Obama were going to object to,” the source told me. With the out-of-touch White House firmly behind the nominees, Senate Democrats got the message that they, too, needed to line up in support. So they did — until they started hearing from outside the Washington bubble. “If you look at Daschle’s experience, he came out of a meeting with members of the committee, and the Democratic members said they supported him,” the insider pointed out. “But on the next day he withdrew.”
5 comments:
Fortunately Chicago politics doesn't always translate nation wide.
I think it's worse than that, and it was present during the Clinton and Bush administrations, too. Namely, they don't give a hoot what voters think; they know better and they're going ahead with what they want to do. Jam it down voters' throats! Both parties do it.
I can't really defend the indefensible especially as I had a tax problem that after two years was apparently not a problem to the IRS. But the current Tax Code is, according to the Printing Office, 16,845 pages long. Now it seems to me that unless one is preparing to be a CPA or a tax lawyer with the fervor of pre-teen rabbinical students then there are bound to be mistakes.
Maybe this group of sacrificial lambs might just see the neccessity in reforming and shrinking the code....Nah!
Pat Patterson,
Just like the so-called stimulus bill, with it's volumes of unexplored verbage, there are treasures to be found (or hidden)!
As you are keenly aware, the massive scale of these documents support a hope that nobody will look too closely at what is really ordained within while providing ample opportunity to twist new opportunities for self-enrichment.
FLAT TAX & TERM LIMITS! Remove the hiding places of those that serve themselves first.
Concur on the Flat Tax!
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