My Plan to Finance the Billion-Dollar Bailouts

Earlier today, Nancy Killefer withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government, because of tax problems, which resulted in a lien on her home in 2005 by the District of Columbia for failure to pay unemployment taxes on household help for a year and a half.

A few hours later, former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle withdrew his name for consideration to be the new Secretary of Health and Human Services after the outcry over his failure to pay over $128,000 in income taxes, and almost $12,000 in penalties, for unreported consulting work, a free car service, and exaggerated charitable contributions over the last three years.

It seems like only a week ago that Timothy Geithner was confirmed as the new Treasury Secretary, in spite of his belated payment of over $34,000 in back taxes for consulting work. Wait a minute. It was only a week ago!

President Obama must have been working a lot of overtime to come up with these flawed choices.

I’d like to offer the country some lemonade from all these lemons. Since the American taxpayer is on the hook to repay the billions of dollars handed over to corporate America, maybe President Obama should only nominate the very richest people for his administration. If we can then force them to pay all the taxes they’ve cheated on in past years, we might go a long way toward solving this current financial burden placed on honest American taxpayers.

If we can recover $140,000 from Tom Daschle, who only earned $5.2 million over the last two years, think how much more we could recover if Obama would name former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to a cabinet position. Thain earned over $83 million in 2007 alone, and was roundly criticized for handing out billions in bonuses late last year as Merrill Lynch went down for the count, only to be bailed out a short time later by Bank of America with American taxpayer dollars. With ethics like that, you just know there has to be a few skeletons in this man’s financial closet.

So, please join me in supporting the nomination of John Thain. We can voice our objections once he’s paid his back taxes . . .