TheAgitator.com
Do as We Say…Not as We Do
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Jim Geraghty captures the absurdity: Obama praises actual, law-breaking tax cheats Tim Geithner and Charlie Rangel for their efforts to rein in “tax cheats” who actually followed the law, but took advantage of perfectly legal tax loopholes.
I gave up on McCain after he supported the original TARP (though I vehemently opposed Obama), I figured we were screwed either way.
But, I didn’t even believe the Obama administration would be this bad.
It is disgusting. I was hoping Obama intended to fix things and not just populate gov’t with his corrupt cronies.
So, when can we expect the Obamafans to see the light?
To be fair, Geithner and Rangel are on the Obama team and they need the tax dodgers money to pay for all the big government.
Wait…that’s like the opposite of fair.
Bronwyn, Obama is doing exactly what the Obamafans want him to do. And the rest are fed up and will now vote Republican, so we’re screwed. Political machine win.
@Bronwyn:
Sometime after all the Bush fans do.
@robert:
Were you hoping for pigs to fly, too?
I love it when the people who make the rules cry fowl when other people actually follow them as written.
Tax laws are, of course, one area where that happens a lot. Another case is when the government, having heavily loaded the dice in its own favor, prosecutes someone for a crime and then when the guy gets acquitted, blames the guy’s lawyer for getting him off on a “technicality”, as if the poor powerless government, crusading to fearlessly serve the citizens of the country, but saddled by the totally unreasonable and oppressive limits imposed by the Constitution, is the ultimate victim.
Those tax havens are where Kennedy, Geithner, and Rangel hide their money. There will still be a safe haven somewhere.
@#7: Dave, you said it much better than I ever could. The government always has the high ground in the battle. I suppose that it’s a good thing that it is staffed almost entirely by people who do not realize this, otherwise we’re all screwed.
Uh, what? The government is full of people who not only understand (at least subconsciously) that the government is always considered right until proven wrong and still usually right even then, they abuse that to it’s fullest potential.
Cops are the most visible example, with new stories coming in just about every day about how they do whatever they want and get away with it because they’re cops and cops can do no wrong.
You’ve got politicians who leverage this by making blatantly evil laws, and anybody who complains is told to shut up and work on getting the law changed (I wasn’t aware politicians gave a rat’s ass what I think).
You’ve got regulators, who can bring their huge fine print book of rules down on anybody they don’t like for one reason or another, who get a pass because they’re just enforcing the rules.
I’m sure there’s more examples, but that’s not really the point. The point is that such “do no wrong” status shouldn’t be granted to anybody, ever, whether that person knows about that status (and acts on it) or not.
I wonder what the
new SSHuffington Post says about this blatant hypocrisy…Oh, they say every ounce of corruption and theft is entirely Congress’ fault and that Obama should be named president for life. Since Obama is the executive and was never involved in Congress in any way. Classy and objective as usual, Huffpo.Eh, there’s not really any cognitive dissonance here.
1) The tax code is complicated.
2) People can illegally pay less than they owe in an honest accident because of (1); Geithner and Rangel may or may not fall into this category.
3) People can use legally pay less than a “fair share” by manipulating (1).
You can have more sympathy for people in (2) than (3). “Legal” does not equal “Moral”.
Of course, the real answer here (beyond rambling about taxation being theft and so on), is a simplified enough tax code to prevent both (2) and (3). Hopefully people actually attempt this sooner or later, though I suspect a refactoring of the tax code rather than a rewrite may be the best idea, ala replacing old and crappy computer code.
So basically, there’s a magic number of dollars it will each cost each person to not get thrown in prison this year.
Your options for computing this magic number are to
a) consult the big book of “Money You Thought You Owned But Actually Don’t”
b) consult Obama, or Tim Geithner, or Charlie Rangel, and they’ll dream up a number for you and call it a “fair share”.
Apparently the correct answer is to consult both, and take the higher value, because otherwise you’re cheating the government out of it’s hard earned dollars that it would have used to feed orphans and shoot dogs.
It’s important to remember that this is a nation of people not a nation of laws. Who you are and who you know is more important than what you do in determining guilt or innocence. If you want to live under the rule of law instead of the rule of lawmakers go move to the USA instead of the Federalized Government of Obama.
I don’t think equality under the rule fell apart on Obama’s watch. He’s just the current torch carrier.
I meant equality under the law and I was mainly responding to max.
Zargon:
Of course people who use legal loopholes shouldn’t be legally punished – they followed the law, the law should be applied.
But, Obama’s speech wasn’t about legally punishing people for legal behavior, as far as I can read. It’s about:
a) Changing the law to better reflect the intent of the law;
b) Increasing oversight;
c) Insulting people who use the loopholes.
(c) is a bit tasteless, but I don’t see the huge problem with any of this. There’s plenty of examples of people using laws in ways other than the stated or intended purpose of said laws, but in ways those laws technically cover; they justly get a lot of criticism. I don’t see why this doesn’t also apply to the tax code.
(Also, there’s a reason I put “fair share” in scare quotes, and it’s hardly a concept that should be used in the execution of laws. But one would assume if we’ve accepted (say) income taxes as not inherently injust, a tax code that taxed a man making $100,000 $4,000 and one making $15,000 $5,000 would not be “fair”.)
Max, i don’t have the date as the link is long dead, but this was from about a year ago from an AP article. Precedent. Inconceivable. Socrates willingly drank the hemlock when the law said it was time. So what happens when a lawyer is confronted with an ethical dilemma? Its the poor craftsman that blames it on the tools.
“This blanket notion that you can’t subpoena White House aides where there’s evidence of genuine wrongdoing I think is completely misguided,” Obama told reporters recently. “We’re a nation of laws and not men and women so, you know, and that’s a precedent I don’t mind living with as president of the United States.”
RICO and the Patriot Act come to mind…
And it’s very distasteful when government does it.
As far as I can tell, it’s not about insulting them at all. It’s about stating that the people that use these loopholes are in the wrong, which you seem to buy into, with your earlier referent to legal but not moral.
But that’s exactly the wrong way to look at this. Those tax loopholes don’t appear by themselves. It’s not as though creating a loophole-free tax code is harder than an iron-clad one – in fact, it’s precisely the opposite. They could simply say “you owe us X% of all money earned in the USA”. Bam, all tax loopholes instantly closed in 11 words.
Each tax loophole was put in place intentionally, for the benefit of somebody. That somebody or somebodys almost assuredly had connections, and/or gave the right people some nice campaign donations (which, incidentally, is why the tax code will never, ever, become appreciably simpler. Selling tax loopholes for even a few percent of the savings is a lucrative side business.) We can be pretty damn sure that those connected somebodys aren’t who Obama is talking about here, nor who will be targeted by any changes in the tax code. He’s talking about the people that look at the tax code and realize “hey, if I do X, I can save a bunch of money on my taxes”. Obama would dearly love for you to believe those people are evil, or at least in the wrong. But they are not. They read the rules and played by the rules, and even if the rules are unjust, Obama, nor anybody else, has any room to complain about those people.
Ultimately the notion that people who stayed within the letter of the Law are guilty of something anyway and should be punished stems from the position that paying money to the State is A Good Thing.
I think that the history of what assorted States have tended to do with tax money refutes that notion. Paying taxes may be necessary – I am a 47 year old male with poor teeth and bad joints; I have few illusions of how I would fair in an Anarchy – but I maintain that it is not good in and of itself. I assert further that anyone pontificating about how much somebody ELSE should pay, if they are already obeying the Law, is a Brobdingnagian tool, and should be gagged with a rancid salami.
Zargon:
Yes, rent-seeking is a problem, although I’d add garden variety incompetence to the mix. But, well, all the rhetoric is actually aimed at various rent-seeking things. (Whether the action will be, well, that’s another question, of course. I’m not quite as cynical as you, but the rent-seeking will of course continue). Cayman Islands tax shelters may be a bit of a stereotype, but they’re not a stereotype of something used by Joe Average or used in ignorance of what they’re doing.