Did the Democrats adopt a plank in their party platform last summer re quiring all of their top dogs to have serious personal tax problems?
Sure looks that way.
Tom Daschle admits that he failed to pay more than $120,000 in taxes on a private car and driver furnished to him for personal use over three years by a media mogul buddy – yet he’s still expected to win confirmation as secretary of health and human services.
That’s not surprising – as a former Senate majority leader, Daschle has a whole lot of Capitol Hill IOUs.
But given the tax delinquencies of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, it makes you wonder whether these guys have any shame at all.
Daschle has raked in a staggering $5.2 million since being defeated for re-election in 2004 – including a big bag of cash from the health-care industry, which he’s set to regulate.
The notion that an old Washington hand like Daschle didn’t know that the free limo and chauffeur represented taxable income seems a bit fanciful.
Yet he says that he didn’t realize this until last June – when “something made him think” he might owe taxes – and that he also didn’t inform the president’s staff until a few days ago.
Meanwhile, President Obama’s vetting team has discovered that Daschle took improper charitable contributions and may owe further taxes on “travel and entertainment services” in the Bahamas and the Middle East for himself and his lobbyist wife.
Yet Obama says he “absolutely” stands behind Daschle – who apparently qualifies for the “exceptionally talented” exemption to the president’s much-ballyhooed conflict-of-interest edicts.
Obama was praised to the skies when he announced no lobbyists would be given high positions in his administration.
Yet it turns out that at least two dozen of his appointees, all the way up to Cabinet level, have been registered lobbyists.
These include: Geithner’s chief of staff, Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist; Middle East envoy George Mitchell – affiliated with a firm with an extensive client list in the region – and William Linn, who, until being named the Defense Department’s No. 2, lobbied for Raytheon, a major defense contractor.
Change?
None that seems to matter.