Can I stop paying my taxes on time, just like you did?
In better economic times, Mr. Geithner’s confirmation to be President-elect Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary might be in danger after the disclosure this week that he had paid more than $48,000 in delinquent taxes and interest. But with the economy so fragile, many senators are loath to rattle financial markets by rejecting someone with Mr. Geithner’s qualifications and international respect. By late Wednesday, Republicans as well as Democrats were predicting he would survive the controversy and be confirmed next week.
On the eve of this new post-Bush, postracial, postpartisan era, it dismays me that apparently there are still different sets of rules for the powerful and rich and us working schmos, regardless of the fact that Obama's campaign spun a happy dream of an administration whose members played by the the same rules as the rest of us.
I am the daughter of a tax collector, and I have a probably unhealthy respect for authority. I fervently believe in government's role in providing a base level of services to all of us in this society, and I believe in my role in contributing to that mission by paying taxes. I even accept the precept (sort of) that I can't pick and choose which government functions I fund. In my family, tax protesters have been looked upon as misguided whack jobs. Yet in the past six years I have felt so impotent, so unheard and unrepresented by my government, that I have considered tax protest. The main reason of course is the Iraq war, but the financial bailout is now running a very close second. I am impotently furious that my tax dollars are being handed out, with no strings, to companies whose only instinct is self-preservation and whose only mandate is profit maximization.
Pretty much the only thing stopping me from protesting by withholding my tax payments is my middle-class fear of stepping out of line. If I weren't afraid that the shithammer of financial and reputation ruin would slam down on my head, I would write a check for a quarter of my income to well-run charitable organizations of my choice, and decline to hand over the equivalent amount to the federal and state governments.
Today the Senate voted to turn loose the second half of the $700 billion TARP bailout, after the first installment didn't loosen up the credit markets. What was it that our revered outgoing president said? "Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice ... won't get fooled again."
I don't have any smart conclusions. I just need to vent my disappointment at the apparent grinding on of the system, very much the same as it ever was, only worse.
