A Word About a Word About Timothy Geithner
James Fallows says he would swallow hard and vote for Geithner even though Fallows thinks he’s lying (basically) when he says that he failed to pay taxes by mistake.
I think there may be a generational thing here. Fallows is from the generation that still believed in do-it-yourself. Geithner (like myself) is from the outsourcing generation. I can’t prove that Geithner isn’t lying – that he knew he owed taxes and just didn’t pay them – but I find that explanation highly implausible. Rather, I’d assume Geithner simply put the question of taxes into a box called “things my accountant worries about” and never opened the box. And never fully briefed his accountant about what his obligations might be. I know countless individuals who have done similarly.
And as for the statement that a Treasury Secretary should clearly have known his obligations – yeah, and you’d think PhD mathematicians should be able to do simple multiplication in their heads. And, from personal experience, I can tell you they frequently can’t.
It’s not admirable to fail to take personal charge of your legal and financial responsibilities in this manner. It’s risky even if you never plan to be nominated to the President’s cabinet. But it’s quite common. That’s the way the overclass rolls these days.
Did Geithner actually use an accountant for tax prep? I thought his testimony and all the reporting indicated he prepared his returns himself, using TurboTax. That would seem to invalidate your hypothesis, along with the info that the IMF apparently made him aware that he was responsible for these taxes.
— lnewcomer · Jan 23, 12:04 AM · #
I was thinking along your lines, that Geithner wasn’t greedy or evil, just sort of embarrassingly negligent. Learning that he never payed back the taxes he owed from 2001-2002 until the nomination, because the IRS could only make him pay what he owed in 2003-2004, puts a bit of a twist on that. It’s like he really, really didn’t want to look in that box you were talking about, even when there was good reason to believe he should, lest he get in trouble. It’s the difference between an understandable oversight and a cowardly failure to correct that oversight.
I still don’t believe he was greedy or evil, and I don’t know if it should disqualify him from the nomination, but it does reveal something of his character.
— Blar · Jan 23, 12:18 AM · #
If Geithner really doesn’t have an accountant, then he didn’t make a serious effort to do his own taxes correctly. Doesn’t change the story that much.
As for the IMF making him aware of his tax obligations: I’ve never been able to confidently interpret a tax-related communication without discussing it with my accountant. And I’ve gotten tripped up before by fairly basic things. That’s not because I’m dumb. It’s because I absolutely hate thinking about this stuff and want somebody else to deal with it for me. Which is not admirable.
My point was just that the hypothesis that he was trying to avoid paying taxes is absurd on its face. So if it’s not a reasonable mistake for anybody to make, then he really wasn’t paying any attention. Which I can believe.
— Noah Millman · Jan 23, 12:19 AM · #
Look, maybe I’m shooting too quick without thinking. But I’m trying to think of anyone I know who, told by his lawyer that he is not liable for taxes he failed to pay some years back, would pay them anyway because he felt guilty. And I can’t think of anyone. Maybe that means I run with a very ethically questionable crowd. (Don’t answer that . . .)
— Noah Millman · Jan 23, 12:28 AM · #
Noah, you are right that no one would ever pay taxes that he no longer owed as a result of the statute of limitations. So I agree that Geithner’s conduct in not paying for 2001-02 isn’t particularly remarkable.
On the other hand, I think it’s pretty obvious that he’s lieing, (or at least intentionally evading), when he says (or maybe implies) that once his accountant told him he had to pay for 03-04, he never thought about whether he had correctly paid for 01-02.
Once you have to write a $40,000 check on a public employee salary, the thing comes out of the “my accountant is taking care of it box” and you can reasonably be expected to ask “Why, exactly, does the IRS have the right to make me pay an extra $40K this year.”
Once Geithner was convinced that he had to pay 03-04, he obviously knew that he had gotten away with underpaying 01-02, and he obviously never would have paid those years unless team Obama told him to.
I put this in the uncomfortable catagory of “unavoidable, harmless lies to Congress,” in that (1) everyone knows the truth, so there isn’t much actual deception, and (2) if Geithner said what everyone knows to be true, instead of saying something patently false, he wouldn’t be confirmed.
Justice Thomas’s statement that he had never in his life thought about the constitutional reasoning in Roe v. Wade was a similar statement – everyone knew it was false, but if he didn’t say it, he wouldn’t be confirmed.
Of course, it’s jailable perjury in both cases, which is why it’s an uncomfortable issue.
— J Mann · Jan 23, 05:13 PM · #
Mr. Geithner has a smirk when confronted with the embarrasment of his non payment of taxes. I decoded his facial expressions of one is disdain. Further has eyes expressed subdued arrogance. He is of a generation of getting by with as little personal tax compliance as he has to. He strikes me as a bumptious character.
— Karl-Wolfgang Helft · Jan 28, 12:18 AM · #