Discretionary Taxes?

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did. The House Ways and Means subcommittee overseeing the Bailout Billions reviewed the tax records of 23 firms who received the biggest bailouts. They found 13 (57%) of these companies owed a total of $220 million in back taxes. Sit down. This is going to hurt . . . One bailout recipient owed $113 million in unpaid federal income tax from 2005 and 2006. A second recipient owed $102 million dating back to 2004. A third unworthy recipient hadn’t paid over $1.3 million in federal income and employment taxes.

All of this, even though the companies receiving bailout bonus bucks were required to sign contracts confirming that they did not owe any unpaid taxes. Nevertheless, our resident knuckleheads at the Treasury Department never asked to see any tax records.

Rep. John Lewis, the chairman of the subcommittee conducting the review asked the obvious question, “If we looked at all 470 recipients, how much would they owe?” When Lewis asked for someone at the Treasury Department to provide a private briefing on what was being done to investigate these unpaid taxes he was told, “no one was available.”

Perhaps our elected representatives were a little too quick to accept Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, after revelations of Geithner’s own failure to pay taxes. Have we put the fox in charge of the coop? How about all the other tax dodgers and tax cheats that Obama’s recently placed on the U.S. payroll? How about Obama’s other appointees, who had to bow out of the running because of their tax troubles?

I don’t know about you, but I find it very discouraging that those of us who DO pay our taxes are paying so much money to enrich the undeserving beneficiaries of our tax dollars, whether in the form of socialist bailouts or government paychecks.

I’m furious with companies who offer a signature-based lie on government contracts, yet regard bonus compensation contracts as some kind of Holy Grail. Are you listening AIG?

Republicans and Democrats alike contributed to this mess. It’s sad when the only people prospering in this troubled economy are the crooked politicians and corporate charlatans who created it. Most taxpayers are tired of footing the bill for corruption and greed, but history shows that these same taxpayers will probably forget their outrage before the next election. I won’t, and I hope you won’t either.