Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, February 03, 2009 10:01:42 AM
What happens when your own cheerleading team starts booing one of your players? Barack Obama just found out. The New York Times
has called for Tom Daschle to withdraw, and for Obama to find another,
“less-blemished” Secretary of HHS, and not just regarding taxes (via The Corner)
As the Times notes, the American tax system relies heavily, although
not completely, on voluntary compliance. The IRS does not have the
personnel to go door to door to demand financial records of every
person living in America, nor should they. High-profile tax cheats
undermine that system of voluntary compliance as an army of Hot Air
commenters have noted. If Daschle and Geithner (and Al Franken and
Charlie Rangel) can skip paying taxes with no penalties and still get
high public office, why should any of us pay?
The Times takes a rather remarkable tone in this editorial as well.
They don’t buy the explanation Daschle has offered at all — that he had
no idea that he owed the taxes. The editors note that Daschle didn’t
bother to actually pay the taxes until months after he
supposedly began thinking about the problem. That only happened after
Team Obama starting noticing some unrelated oddities in Daschle’s taxes
during the vetting process.
And that brings up another point. The Obama transition team knew
full well that Daschle had significant tax problems when that vetting
process began. Why did Obama insist on keeping Daschle at HHS?
Daschle had spent the last few years as a high-profile lobbyist for the
industry Obama wanted him to regulate, which is exactly what Obama
promised not to do during the campaign. So now we have a lobbyist and a tax cheat rolled up into one person, whom Obama insists
should run Health and Human Services, and he knew all of this well
before announcing Daschle and submitting his name for confirmation.
It’s not like Obama can claim to be surprised.
Even Obama’s biggest cheerleaders object to the stink of Daschle. Perhaps Obama may start thinking about Plan B.