When Barack Obama selected Tom Daschle to be his secretary of Health and Human Services one of the last thinks he could have imagined was that Daschle was a 6-figure tax evader. Yet here we are again.
What is it with Democrats and taxes? According to Vice-President Joe Biden, paying taxes is a patriotic duty. The left was in lock-step agreement with Biden after he made this statement. The disconnect between the left’s ideals and the actions of their elite politicians is embarrassing.
Hilzoy says that the problem is one of entitlement:
Part of what bothers me about this is the sense of entitlement: the sense that having a car and driver is just one of those ordinary things that happen to a person, not worth noticing or thinking of as compensation or a gift.
While that’s certainly true, Daschle’s problem goes much deeper than a lack of awareness about the people and things in his environment. Daschle’s unreported income over the 3 years in question was nearly $340,000.
That’s several years of salary for me, a college grad with a master’s degree and a good job in the technology field. For Pete’s sake, how does a man who used to be a U.S. Senator forget that he was paid enough to provide for 7.5 average American families? Well, math is hard.
Unfortunately, the unreported income isn’t even the real issue. What’s particularly offensive about Daschle’s “problem” is the other correction that he had to make to pass legal muster: reducing his charitable contributions by $14,963.
Claiming extra itemized deductions doesn’t just happen by accident or through negligence.