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.

Secretary Sebelius

At first, I joked I was happy President Obama was (reportedly) going to pick Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as his new Health and Human Services secretary — just because it would finally get her out of Kansas.

But the more I think about it, the less I like it.

She could quite possibly do less damage as an obscure cabinet member than she has as our governor. But knowing the president's ambitious plans to socialize health care (and add to whatever "human services" he can) I fear she'll be afforded more authority than she has earned.

To be fair, Sebelius has done a good job in Kansas of holding the line on spending. In her first days in office, she cut several "small" expenditures — housekeeping staff, printing fees, etc. — that were a drop in the bucket when compared to state education or Medicare costs, but were significant expenditures in their own right. She has, on multiple occasions, refused to increase spending when many governors would not have done so.

But a couple of the high-profile battles she has fought as governor border on insane.

For two years, she waged an idiotic war on gun rights, twice vetoing a concealed carry law that passed the Kansas Legislature with enormous margins. Kansas was one of a tiny handful of states that had no concealed carry law at the time, and concealed carry laws are effective at fighting crime, morally sound and popular. But Sebelius decided to fly in the face of popular opinion and reason. Fortunately, her veto of the bill was overridden.

Perhaps it was worse when the Sebelius Administration abused its powers of regulation to reject a legitimate, legal business enterprise when Sunflower Electric tried to expand its power plant near Holcomb in 2007. Without a legal or moral leg to stand on, Sebelius invented a "carbon dioxide" threat and rejected permission that Sunflower should never have had to ask. It would have been the single largest construction project in the state's history, created a significant amount of jobs, and supplied a product — electricity — that we need more and more of every day.

Since, Sunflower has had to take to the courts to attempt to overturn her idiotic ruling that industry is bad. A barely-too-small-to-override-a-veto majority attempted to override Sebelius' decision with legislation, but fell a few votes short of a veto override. My parents and most of the rest of southwest Kansas now have to pay legal fees because their electric cooperative must sue for the right to conduct business.

To this day, only a handful of hippies in Lawrence, 25.3 percent of state legislators, and Sebelius agree with her decision to unilaterally deny commerce in the state. She gives no indication of caring what her constituents think.

The biggest problem with Washington is that talented, good-intentioned politicians go there and then change: They lose track of why people elected them in the first place, and they become a part of the problem rather than the solution. With Kathleen Sebelius, if President Obama brings her in to his cabinet, this will not be the case.

She was out of touch to begin with.