Obama and the tax cheats

I recently heard a joke: Democrats are always voting for higher taxes because they know they won't pay them anyway.

It's just not funny.

And now we've found another (what is this, 37?) nominee by President Barack Obama who owes huge amounts of taxes from previous years, and is going to pay them — now — before taking hold of an executive branch office.

Ron Kirk, a former mayor of Dallas and Obama's nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, owes about $10,000 in federal income taxes from years ago. (On a side note, somebody ought to slap Kirk for wearing those idiotic glasses.)

Kirk is just the latest in the growing list of Obama personnel to decide — "voluntarily" — to pay their back taxes ... now that they've been appointed to high office. The most egregious of them remains "Tax-Free" Timothy Geithner, now the Secretary of the Treasury. His reward for choosing not to pay taxes was to be put in charge of the federal department that oversees the KGB. Err ... IRS.

Add U.S. Rep. Charlie "Cha-Ching" Rangel, who is under investigation for not paying all of his income taxes — he's chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the one that forms tax law, by the way — and there are some serious issues here.

At least Tom Daschle had the decency to step down. (And that was a three-fer ... it disgraced him, allowed him to redeem himself, and then got Kathleen Sebelius out of Kansas. Go Tom!)

That allegedly wise men, charged with writing and enforcing tax laws, are having difficulty understanding our tyrannically complex tax code is proof positive that it needs to be edited down tremendously. If the ones who wrote it can't figure it out, how are the rest of us supposed to?

And the ones who wrote it have a special obligation to hire competent tax attorneys or accountants and get it right. They're applying laws onto the rest of us, and they must live up to them themselves.

During the campaign, when Obama said all of those lovely things about the Bush-era across-the-board tax cuts "going to the wealthiest few" and helping people "who weren't even asking for it," I'm a little skeptical. Not only are those "fortunate few" failing to voluntarily pony up more of their hard-earned money than they're legally required to (as they would, if Obama were right about them secretly desiring to pay more) — but in the case of Obama's employees, they aren't even paying for their obligations.

These people take my money. The money that I earn, through no help from them or anybody else. And they don't think they have to pay their part, too.

I can't imagine anything more outrageous.