As the debate on raising tax rates heats up, the Washington Post has come up with a novel way of raising federal revenues: collect the taxes that are already owed by government employees.
In the Whitehouse alone, 41 of Obama's aides owe $831,000 in taxes that they don't seem worried about paying...and that no one cares enough to collect.
Does that seem like small change? Then let's include the 638 workers in the Senate and House of Representatives who owe a total of $9.3 million dollars. At the Labor Department, 463 employees owe $7.4 million dollars.
Still not enough to impress you? Then consider the total of unpaid taxes for all federal employees (who are well-documented as having much better salaries and perks than private sector peons with similar jobs) - a nice, round $1 billion dollars.
The refusal to pay taxes crosses party lines and is based not in political ideology but in a sense of entitlement...and a clear belief that the governmental "ruling class" does not have to play by the rules they impose on the little people.
As well as an apparent belief that once they catch the "little people," they're owed a pot of gold.
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All's well that ends well. Over the weekend, pastor Terry Jones decided not to have a Koran bonfire, and his congregation presumably made rice krispie treats for the homeless out of all the marshmallows they'd planned to toast.
Similarly, "Ground Zero mosque" proponent Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf conceded that "If I knew that this would cause this kind of pain, I wouldn’t have done it.” So he's going to move the mosque, right? Right...?
Unfortunately, he says he can't move the proposed project now because "the headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack… (there’s) the danger of the radicals in the Muslim world to our national security, to the national security of our troops.” He further explained "If we don't handle this crisis correctly it could become something which could really become very, very, very dangerous indeed.”
Hope n' Change would like to give some free public relations advice to Imam Rauf. If you really want to build a mosque to help heal the wounds of the last 9/11... don't do it by threatening us with the next 9/11.
Oh, have another. Maybe you DON'T have diabetes.
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Following the resignation of Christina Romer, the Whitehouse has announced the name of their new head of the Council of Economic Advisors: Austan Goolsbee.
As much as we'd like to think this is actually the name of a Mike Myers' movie for Halloween, the truth is that Goolsbee - an economics professor at the University of Chicago - has been a longtime economic advisor to the Obama administration. In other words, we're already enjoying the benefits of his keen financial insight!
Goolsbee also considers himself to be an amateur comedian, and has made numerous television appearances. Not, as you might think, on The Addams Family, but rather as a frequent guest on The Daily Show.
In fact, Goolsbee just may be a better comedian than economist; he's a big proponent of letting the Bush tax breaks for small business expire, even though we're in the midst of a crushing recession with record unemployment.
Now that's funny!
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