THE TAX MAN: 41 Obama White House aides owe the IRS $831,000 in back taxes -- and they're not alone
Originally published in Sep. 2010.
Good to hear that Geithner is not alone in tax evasion. Federal employees owe more than $1 billion in back taxes, and the White House has its share.
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Reprinted with permission.
Over the years a lot of suspicion has built up across the country about Washington and its population of opportunistic transients coming to see themselves as a special kind of person, somehow above average working Americans who don't labor down in that monument-strewn former swamp.
Well, finally, an end to all those undocumented doubts. Thanks to some diligent digging by the Washington Post, those suspicions can at last be put to rest.
They're correct. Accurate. Dead-on. Laser-guided. On target. Bingo-bango. As clear as it's always seemed to those Americans who don't feel special entitlements and do meet their government obligations.
We now know that federal employees across the nation owe fully $1 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service.
As in, 1,000 times one million dollars. All this political jabber about giving middle-class Americans a tax cut. Thousands of feds have been giving themselves one all along -- unofficially. And these tax scofflaws include more than three dozen folks who work for the president with that newly decorated Oval Office.
The Post's T.W. Farnum did some research and found that out of the total sum, just 638 workers on Capitol Hill owe the IRS $9.3 million in back taxes. As in, overdue. The IRS gets stiffed by the legislative body that controls its budget. How Washington works.
Now, back taxes have been a problem for the Obama-Biden administration. You may recall early on that Tom Daschle was the president's top pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. But it turned out the former Democratic senator, who was un-elected from South Dakota in 2004, owed something like $120,000 to the IRS for things from his subsequent benefactor that he just forgot to pay taxes on. You know how that is. $120G's here or there. So he dropped out.
And then we learned this guy Timothy Geithner owed something like $42,000 in back taxes and penalties to the IRS, which is one of the agencies that he'd be in charge of as secretary of the Treasury. The fine fellow who's supposed to know about handling everyone else's money. In the end this was excused by Washington's bipartisan CYA culture as one of those inadvertent accidental oversights that somehow never seem to happen on the side of paying too much taxes.
And under Geithner's expert guidance the U.S. economy has been, well, wow! Just look at it.
Privacy laws prevent release of individual tax delinquents' names. But we do know that as of the end of 2009, 41 people inside Obama's very own White House owe the government they're allegedly running a total of $831,055 in back taxes. That would cover a lot of special chocolate desserts in the White House Mess.
In the House of Representatives, 421 people owe a total $6,524,892. In the Senate, 217 owe $2,774,836. In the IRS' parent department, Treasury, 1,204 owe $7,670,814. At the Labor Department, where Secretary Hilda Solis' husband had some back-tax problems before her confirmation, 463 owe $7,481,463. Eighty-one workers for the Federal Reserve System's board of governors owe $1,076,733.
Over at the Justice Department, which is so busy enforcing other laws and suing Arizona, 1,971 employees still owe $14,350,152 in overdue taxes.
Then, we come to the Department of Homeland Security, which is run by Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona who preferred to call terrorist acts "man-caused disasters." Homeland Security is keeping all of us safe by ensuring that a Dutch tourist is aboard every inbound international flight to thwart any would-be bomber with explosives in his underpants.
Within that department, there reside 4,856 people who owe the tax agency a whopping total of $37,012,174.
And they're checking our pockets for metal and coins?
-- Andrew Malcolm
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Apr 25, 2011 at 2:26 PM
Reader Comments (10)
Oh how the world would be re-aligned for a probably brief but most definitely sweet interval of time, if only I were IRS commissioner.
When politicians and bureaucrats (aka government) claim they own a part of the money earned by any man or woman, such politicians and bureaucrats claim they own a man or woman's time.
In essence, owning someone's time against their will is SLAVERY. Any kind of income taxation amounts to nothing more than slavery.
The 16th Amendment authorizing politicians and bureaucrats to tax income stands in conflict to Section 1, of the 13th Amendment:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Clearly, the 13th Amendment came before the 16th Amendment. Thus, the 16th Amendment could never have been incorporated into the Constitution without first a repeal of the 13th Amendment from both a legal standpoint and from a logical one.
When shall men and women awaken to truth?
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005921.html#axzz0zSKKKN6M
The Act of 1862 established the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The Commissioner was given the power to assess, levy, and collect taxes, and the right to enforce the tax laws through seizure of property and income and through prosecution. The powers and authority remain very much the same today.
In 1868, Congress again focused its taxation efforts on tobacco and distilled spirits and eliminated the income tax in 1872. It had a short-lived revival in 1894 and 1895. In the latter year, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the income tax was unconstitutional because it was not apportioned among the states in conformity with the Constitution.
Anyone remember rubbergate? That was another form of sacred cow privilege of excess.
There's rubbergate...
It is funny that when both parties are involved, one side exploits the wrongdoing to their benefit, instead of all getting tarred and feathered.
Ole Buzz Lukens (R) was certainly no saint with his conviction tied to the banking scandal, as well as his sexcapades with juveniles.
More realistically, what if half payed and half didn't. In this country, don't the law abiding get screwed and the criminals get bailed-out? Would the law abiding half simply bear the tax burden of the other half? Who would want to be the first sucker to pay Federal income taxes in that scenario?
So I ask the question ... not to incite breaking the law, or even conscientious objection based on Constitutional principle ... but hypothetically ... What if they gave a tax and nobody paid?
http://letthemfail.us/archives/5486
Many good payers would go down in the feeding frenzy im afraid. It would be Chunked Out in big blocks. If a city had 70% non payers, everyone would go to............................!
Pulling something like this back in 1900, maby it would stand a chance. Reamber there is about 68% of people that work for the goverment. Of the 32% left, only 28% are tax paying people footing the whole bill.
We would be eazy to spot. We have painted our selfs into a corner with no way out im afraid. But a very good thought. All we need to do is bend over. The order to screw us is being signed as we speak.
I sure do like the way you think thoe. Been thinkin like that for 10 years now.
Evan back then, it would be a streach, at any-means.............? "But-I-Like How Ya's Think"....!