Tax Protest

There is one surefire way to ensure a whole-sale tax protest: Have people at the top of the government not pay them.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) had a great line on Friday about the Democrats and taxes. They like to hike them because they don’t pay them.

That came on the heels of new revelations that Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Tom Daschle didn’t pay more than $100,000 in back taxes until he discovered that he might have to go back in the government.

This came after earlier revelations that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner willfully evaded taxes that he should have paid when he worked at the World Bank until he figured out that he was going back into government.

Geithner was confirmed because both Republicans and Democrats decided that he was the only guy who could help the Obama administration during this financial crisis. He was certainly better than any of the other Democrats that Obama might have considered, but he certainly isn’t the only guy who could guide us through the crisis. Having somebody who didn’t cheat on his taxes would have been better, for example.

The media and the Senate are both fixated on the clever spin that Daschle didn’t know he had to pay for his car and driver, because he had one when he was Senate leader. But that is not the real scandal. He didn’t pay taxes on $78,000 of consulting income.

That is more than the average salary of a family of four in this country. Imagine if the average family of four didn’t pay any taxes.

Well, that is not that hard to imagine. The fact is that more and more Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes. Because of the children’s tax credits and a variety of other tax breaks, fewer and fewer Americans are paying more and more taxes.

But the question remains: For those of us who do have to pay a lot in taxes, how fair is it that the very wealthy, guys like Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle, don’t pay their taxes while they gives tax credits to people who already don’t pay any taxes?

When Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) try to team up later this year to sock it to those suckers who pay all the taxes in this country, raising their tax rates even further, don’t be surprised to see a huge tax protest by a relatively small group of Americans.

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