Daschle, Geithner, Killifer. The list goes on with countless invisible others whose tax issues are not so much in the cross hairs of the media limelight at the moment. If you google "back taxes and elected officials" there are so many hits it can make your head spin.
Daschle knew in June about his tax problem and it only recently came to light by the Obama people? What happened to the 65-ish page application? We were under the impression that everyone applying for employment in the Obama adminstration would have to fill it out with full disclosure or risk being eliminated. Guess some people ran out of ink before they ran out of disclosures.
In 2008 Rep. Rangel, chair of the House Ways and Means owed 5k plus penalties in back taxes.
In spring 2007 it is alleged that over 450,000 federal employees owed back taxes. The total? About 3B. That is a pretty good chunk of change.
And just toss into the pot the number of other elected officials who owe back property taxes and personal income taxes. Factor that into the rest of the country.
Where's the ethos?
Never mind Wall Street. We've known for years and years that greed is a large part of that ethos. Let us look at the banks, primarily the larger banks who are failng rapidly and insist on blaming the consumer. They still refuse to look to themselves as the larger source of their problems. Never mind that they lent money like crazy to anyone who had a pulse with regard only to the how quickly they could make money on that loan by selling it, shanking it, or just by legal usury. The consumers kept up with the changing payments the best they could until they couldn't. The divisions of the banks were so badly managed that they actually didn't know that each was competing for the limited dollars from the same consumer. They never looked. They didn't care. One division could win. The other could lose. And it didn't matter until there were so many divisions failing that they began to rot the exterior and the bricks and mortar crumbled.
In order to make up those losses, the banks took on another practice. They decided that they would bleed the taxpayer/consumer from both ends at once. First, they would ask for a governmental (taxpayer) bailout and beg that they were only trying to help the consumer. Second they would send notices to thousands and thousands of those same consumers who owed them money through personal loans or credit cards and demand a hike in the interest rates just a tiny hair's breath from the legal definition of usury. And they are getting away with it so far.
Consumers, stretched to the limit with rising costs and shrinking paychecks, for those lucky enough to have paychecks, are coming home to find these notices in their mailboxes telling them that their interest rate increases will double and sometimes triple their payments. Multiply that and I do believe we might be able to fashion some $5 money chains around the globe and back again.
Taxpayers are paying the banks a double remedy. The mega remedy is the giant billion dollar bailouts - that the banks just sit and negotiate and swallow whole, through our governmental talking heads, and the other remedy is our nickel and dimes up their asses by our already depleted wages through their legal usury interst rate hikes.
Ethos? I think not.
Long live denial. It gets some through the night, and apparently through the day. We see it all over. Some people shop like they dropped in from another planet and didn't read the news. Merchants advertise and offer merchandise that makes you actually wonder who the heck is buying that stuff these days. Catalogs, while diminishing, still arrive with 3000 thread count sheets for $1000. The chances are more likely that the catalog itself will be used for bedding v. anyone ordering those sheets.
Even some Superbowl advertisers are still in the dense fog of denial. Yes, talking to you, Monster et al. Bored with your job? More like blessing the stars for being able to hang onto your job. Dead end job? Paycheck, and lucky to have one. Do your homework for crying out loud. And fix your websites. More than half the jobs you list are not even real jobs anymore. The don't exist except on paper. Those companies have shut the doors to new hires and aren't even entertaining resumes. They don't reply, they don't answer questions, and they aren't looking. Much of the recruitment teams are in the unemployment lines.
The credit markets are still as tightly locked up as they were when they put the padlocks on. The chains are still there. Just try to buy a car without a FICO score over 725. Don't even think about going to the bank for a loan. Venture Capital Richie Richs are sending around a fun little note to one another saying "oh oh, times are bad, sit on it, sit on it". Which makes them scared and over the top scrooge-like. So many small start-ups which are the heartbeat of new technology are folding their tents. Unless they got signed, sealed and delivered letters of funding, they aren't getting any. And there is cash money there. Billions of it, but like the banks, it isn't going anywhere.
Always in an ecomony that is sinking, and in a visibly stressed and depressed society, there are those who will always come up from bottom feeding for a bite of fresh meat. Those who can afford it the least, the poor, the elderly, the marginal who possess little common sense, these are the most vulnerable to these phishers. The numbers of letters, emails, phone calls from crooks is far surpassing the number of "change your phone service" solicitations ever recorded. People are getting all kinds of odd solicitations to "lower" their interest rates, "fix" their mortgages, "repair" their credit, "get" that car loan and more. This is the stuff that goes beyond greed to immoral in the worst way. But it is there, just like the roaches that take over when the lights are off.
Some recent articles have been saying that we Americans are quitting. We are giving up, mailing in the keys, shuttering the businesses all too soon. We aren't giving any remedy a chance.
How about it if we start with an ethos that ushers in integrity as the first layer? In the meantime I will take my 9 year old fat ass car in for another fix and tune.
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