Daschle’s Real Lesson
Everyone seems to be missing the “big story” with the Obama Administration’s recent tax cheat woes. At the Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry blog, Conn Carroll quotes George Packer:
You can’t usher in a shining period of good government by fudging your principles when it matters—with those closest to you. If a Republican President were to do the same thing, Democrats would be crying hypocrisy. They shouldn’t keep quiet when the hypocrisy is on their side.
But its not the nascent hypocrisy of the Obama Administration that is striking; we all knew he was either naive, or a liar, with his message of change (and choosing between the two, I’d rather have a calculating liar than a naive man with his finger on the button).
No, the real story is distilled by Michael F. Cannon at National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog in a post titled Oh, the irony:
And while he paid taxes on most of that income, the $128,000 he forgot to pay—more than double the median family income—shows that Daschle himself couldn’t quite grok the monstrous tax code that he helped create during his nearly three decades in Congress, and that he expects his less-sophisticated countrymen to obey on pain of imprisonment.
That’s the point. Here is a man who spent 30-some years writing the very tax law that even he couldn’t understand. If anyone is eligible for the sternest application of the law against “tax cheats”, it would be those that afflicted the country with those laws.
If we can’t hold our legislators to the standard, then can we blame those who’s business is not related to writing and understanding laws? Can any plumbing company, small manufacturer, or independent sales rep be held responsible when Sen. Tom Daschle and the Secretary of the Treasury can claim they don’t understand the law?
Until the average federal legislator can sit down with the tax pamphlet from the IRS, their W-2s and statement from their bank or Fidelity Investments and do their own taxes in 20 minutes, they have failed at their job.
