While DougJ taunted the Strike Farce again last night, he missed out on something- even in their email calling Tim Geithner, the editors at Red State are lying:
Yesterday, Tim Geithner lied to the Senate Finance Committee telling them that the tax program Turbo Tax was to blame for his failure to pay taxes.
Did he? Did he really blame Turbo Tax?
No:
GRASSLEY: Did you use software to prepare your 2001 and 2002 tax returns?
GEITHNER: I did.
GRASSLEY: You did not?
GEITHNER: I did.
GRASSLEY: Oh, you did, OK. Which brand did you use?
GEITHNER: I’m going to — I’ll answer that question, sir, but I want to say these are my responsibility, not the tax software responsibility.
GRASSLEY: OK.
GEITHNER: But I use TurboTax to prepare my returns.GRASSLEY: Did the software prompt you to report income and pay self-employment taxes on your IMF income?
GEITHNER: Not to my recollection, Senator.
GRASSLEY: If yes — well, “not to your recollection.” Well, I thank you for answering those questions.
Not only did he not blame Turbo Tax for his mistakes, but he went out of his way to not blame them. As always, when dealing with Republicans, up is down, black is white. Can Republicans and movement conservatives tell the truth about ANYTHING?
And this is where we are now- I don’t know if Geithner was the best choice for Treasury. I don’t know if the stimulus bill is the right approach to our economic crisis. I don’t know the answers to a lot of the questions out there, but right now my options are to go with the Republicans, the folks who got us into this mess and who seem incapable of uttering a sentence without a bold untruth, and the Democrats.
It really isn’t a close call.
El Cid
Well, when they tell you they want tax cuts and other policies which benefit their plutocratic friends, and when they tell you they want to blow up more brown people, I think you can believe them on that.
Punchy
Not sure I understand. If you’ve chosen to use a tax software program, why would you doubt its results and feel the need to recheck them?
IOW, why is he saying its his fault, not the software’s, when he used the software and it kicked out erroneous results?
Isn’t that akin to saying "yeah, it’s my fault the rope broke. I used it correctly, it was brand new and not damaged out of the package, but since I was holding it, it’s my bad that it snapped." Huh?
MMM
check your e-mail
Fwiffo
They’re like the goddamn Oracle at Delphi, but in reverse. Hmmm, With Bush being reverse Midas, can we get a complete set of inverted Greek myths out of the GOP?
Napoleon
Tom Toles agrees.
The Moar You Know
Exactly. To think that the Republicans want "input" into the stimulus package – I would laugh if the potential conseqences weren’t so serious. They added more debt between 2000-2006 than all previous administrations combined. And now they care about the price tag?
It’s a damn shame that Americans are as civilized as we are – in most societies, a group of people who’ve done what they did to the Treasury would be rounded up en masse and shot in front of a wall in the Capital.
NickM
It gets much worse. Fox, CNN, et al quoted a CBO report that purportedly criticized the stimulus at least 81 times. Problem was, the report did not exist.
SGEW
I don’t know. John McCain calling us all his "fellow prisoners" was a pretty bold piece of truth-telling.
cleek
i’m sure they can. but RedState’s job is to say whatever they think will make the GOP look better (even if it’s only by making Dems look worse).
there’s really no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. of course they’re lying – they have no reason not to. you should just point and laugh.
demimondian
@Punchy: Your metaphor isn’t grounded in reality. TurboTax is an advisory tool, aimed at assisting people with moderately complicated returns. It is *not* intended as a replacement for a professional tax advisor.
Your analogy assumes that he "used the rope correctly". In fact, he put an excessive load on the rope, and it didn’t quite hold up perfectly.
ChrisS
Is it just me, or is it kind of odd that a career treasury guy who made something like ~$250,000 in salary as a senior guy at the IMF and had self-employment income on the side of ~$100,000 would use turbo tax? Surely he has an accountant friend. Lower middle class schlubs with two deductions like me use turbo tax.
Samuel
Um…because you’re the fucking president of the NY Fed, and one would think that if Turbo Tax spits out your returns you’d at least have the foresight to glance over them, look at your income and say "Hey, what about that stipend I was getting from my time at the IMF? Surely that’s reportable income, right?"
Please let’s stop this charade that only Republicans are shameless morons. Are we really expected to believe this shoveled horseshit coming from Obama and the now Treasury Secretary to bring some stability to our financial system and be in charge of the IRS, when he can’t even think to do the same. Fuck, if I was some corporate stooge who worked in the same cubicle at a box factory for 20 years I would double check my tax returns…
I guess it’s too much to ask from the fucking Secretary of the Treasury. Great job Obama….
Zifnab
Up is down. Down is down. They’d have been all over this if he had, in fact, attempted to pin the blame on Turbo Tax. However, the line of questioning on the part of Grassley was an attempt to paint Geithner as willfully negligent. The Red Staters tried to spin it has him being unapologetic. It’s heads I win, tails you lose. Except that Grassley apparently didn’t bother to actually research whether Turbo Tax prompted for that information. So he was basically asking empty questions and hoping Geithner would slip up.
The Republicans are going to get rolled over the next four years because they are inherently lazy. Red State puts up lies that are easily disproved. Grassley asks questions that he should have known the answer to days ago. They are lazy and sloppy, and they’re going to go down 60 – 34 more often than not.
Napoleon
Re: Turbo Tax being at fault.
I understood the whole issue to be that he is claiming that he thought the amounts he received was not subject to federal income tax. I know that certain salaries from certain international organizations, for example the World Bank, do not need to pay US taxes. I recall reading that when there was a whole issue with Paul Wolfowitz’s girlfriend at the World Bank. So I took it that whatever organization he received the funds from he claims he thought was treated like the World Bank (edit, reading up thread apparently it was the IMF). If that is the case it is likely that the question never even gets to his Turbo Tax program because he would, presumably, never have plugged the number in in the first place.
Zifnab
@ChrisS:
Yeah, but the accountant friend wouldn’t do it for free. And even if he did, he’d probably use a software program to assemble the return. A software program like Turbo Tax.
I worked a year for H&R Block doing returns and would have killed to use Turbo Tax software over the dinosaur package they had for us to do data input on.
J Royce
If serves their purpose of the moment, they will issue air sounds to create a word formation that replicates truth … but usually, no.
Though we are going back in time, which is what the Cons said they wanted. So there is that.
Ruth
When wingers insist that the corporate welfare recipients will take care of the economy if we just give them more tax cuts, they are depending on the 20% that still thinks the former cretin in chief did a good job. If you have an iota of brain power, you have learned over the past eight years that only ideology and political gain motivate the right wing. If we let them get power, they ruin the environment, the economy, the schools, the airwaves, and anything else they can get hold of. Q.E.D.
Bill H
I don’t exactly want somebody as Sec’y of Treasury who uses Turbo Tax to figure his taxes. I have a whole lot less financial acumen than he is supposed to have, my income is probably about 10% of his, and even I know enough to know that if it takes a 60# manual to publish the tax laws an off-the-shelf desktop computer tax program is not to my advantage.
And I don’t want to be represented by a Senator who asks questions as stoopid as the ones Grassley is asking, especially when he appears not to be listening to the answers.
Gregory
No.
SASQ.
(After all, reality has a well-known liberal bias.)
Leo
@ChrisS: My father is a lawyer who did some tax work (among other things). During one several-year stretch in his career he was making money in the range you’re talking about. And he always used TurboTax.
Napoleon
@Bill H:
Why not? If all he takes for deductions is the plain vanilla stuff most itemizing taxpayers take, like house interest deductions and the like, why would he act any differant then any of us and not do it himself. He has worked in public jobs almost his entire life so it is unlikely he has a ton of money invested in things like oil and gas wells or horse farms.
Xanthippas
In case anyone is interested, Jim Lindgren at Volokh details (exhaustingly) what TurboTax would and would not prompt Geithner to enter.
For my part, I don’t really give a shit about people not paying their taxes as long as they eventually get around to it and/or aren’t holed up in a compound denying that the IRS has jurisdiction over them.
Xanthippas
I think understanding fiscal policy is a lot different from filing your taxes. Also, I took three tax courses in law school and I’m barely competent to file my own return.
Fwiffo
That doesn’t actually sound that weird to me. I’m a professional programmer, and I know plenty of good programmers that use sophisticated integrated development environments, and plenty that use fairly primitive text editors (even notepad).
I also know lots of computer professionals whose own computers are in terrible states of disrepair. It’s kinda like the guy who’s always fixing everyone else’s car, but who’s always got his own car up on blocks for one reason or another.
Hunter Gathers
I have to admit that watching the Republicans slowly self-immolate themselves will be my new hobby for a while. These morons are politically tone deaf and morally corrupt. We are years away from peak wingnut. That will happen when Govenor Crazy Lady from Alaska gets crushed on election day, be it 2012 or 2016. When thier princess is finally banished back to Alaska for all eternity, they will go back to the caves that spawned them, and then we might get some decent opposition out of Republicans, instead of the retarded shit those idiots are always bitching about.
DougJ
I still say the problem is that they didn’t say something clever like “Will the secretary Geithner us all” or something like what MoveOn would have done.
Ash Can
@Samuel:
If you think that’s what’s going on at this blog, then you’re either willfully ignorant or simply not paying attention.
And speaking of being willfully ignorant/not paying attention, this whole subject has been dissected ad infinitum, from the U.S. Senate all the way down to this blog. Conclusion? Initially an eye-brow raiser, it was explained to everyone’s satisfaction (except maybe a few purity trolls) and dismissed. And never, at any point in the process, was it a deal-breaker. A misstep on Obama’s part? Sweetie, if Obama’s mistakes are going to look like this, I’ll take his mistakes over the Republicans’ successes any damned day of the week.
Fwiffo
Tell me about it. My taxes used to be simple (no mortgage or any other deductions of signficance, so I just 1040-EZ.) I got 700 bucks in Google adsense year before last, and all of a sudden, it’s a fucking nightmare. There’s no line on a 1040-EZ for a 1099-MISC, even though there is for a 1099-INT, and for some obscure Alaska shit. Instead, I have to use this three-hundred page form, with all kinds of crap I don’t understand. Why, because I made a few bucks on the side from Google, do I now have to change the way I report my ROTH?
Brian J
Okay, as far as I understand it, Geithner mistakenly didn’t pay taxes on one or two occasions, as is common for people in his position at the time, but when the error was discovered, he paid the back taxes and/or any penalties associated with them. That’s it.
Is there anything else to this story? I mean, anything at all, in the sense that as weak as it might be, at least it constitutes something for the Republicans to grab hold of? It doesn’t seem like it, but perhaps I’ve missed something. If there is, then perhaps there’s a reason for delaying the proceedings. If there isn’t, which seems to be the case, then it looks like the Republicans are still doing little more than shadow boxing like drunken fools.
Samuel
Dude, you should be asking for a bailout too. You went to law school and took three tax courses and still can’t fill out your tax return??
For pete’s sake people, we’re not talking about some pencil-pusher in the bowels of the Treasury somewhere. This is THE FUCKING TREASURY SECRETARY!
He’s in charge of the IRS–THEY COLLECT TAXES! Of COURSE its a fucking problem when the Treasury Secretary uses Turbo Tax and doesn’t even double check what’s coming out of his printer!! For fuck’s sake! Not even that–he doesn’t even realize he’s supposed to pay taxes on a stipend he got from his employer of 3-4 years?!?!
And as for "fiscal policy"– this guy was at the Fed when they decided "Hey–great idea guys–let’s throw billions of dollars down a fucking sink-hole to save these banks, because then they’ll REALLY get back to solvency"….
This guy has two strikes on him as far as I’m concerned. I understand everyone is drinking the Obama Kool-Aid…but please…common-sense should prevail here. Otherwise get yourself some friggin "Blue State Strike Force" t-shirts and tin foil hats to parade around in…
The Other Steve
The last 4 years I have filed my tax returns using TaxCut, which while not perfect is a hell of a lot better than TurboTax, mainly because that company keeps playing licensing games each and every year.
In either case, to file your returns electronically not only do you have to buy this software for $50, you have to pay $25 on top of that to do the electronic filing.
But the fact is, filing taxes just isn’t that hard and doing electronic filing doesn’t benefit you much. It might benefit the government, but if that was the case why would they insist on charging us $25?
Last year instead of paying the electronic filing fee, I printed the returns out and mailed them in. I had my refund check within two weeks.
This year, I’m going to do it all manually with a regular pencil and paper and save the $50. Won’t take me any more time either. You can download all the forms off the internet and print them out.
Conservatively Liberal
Shorter Samuel: I like to make something out of nothing.
Gotcha. Hyperventilate away.
The Other Steve
True. MoveOn is so incredibly clever, entertaining and remarkably ineffective.
RSA
I think the Republican argument is that you want people in positions of power who have taken charge of their personal lives, and who are thus immune to scandals due to their personal oversights and shortcomings. You know, people like George W. Bush.
Brett
My favorite example of mendacity at that site is this:
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2008/11/03/its-easy-to-vote-in-wisconsin/
Lying about the applicable law, creating a climate that is conducive to voter suppression, and not giving a damn, all at the same time.
You go, "force".
Xanthippas
I should be, but for different reasons than that. Tax lawyers don’t fill out returns.
It’s not "drinking the Koo-Aid" to not get your panties in a twist over silly stuff. Look, I think the guy jacked up his taxes (a sin a lot of people commit) and probably regrets it, and that’s that. I just don’t see tax issues as being a disqualification for a cabinet post, short of deliberate tax fraud.
Brian J
Because, if the services I’ve used are any indication, they aren’t perfect. They make it ludicrously simple to use, which is good for someone like me whose taxes probably aren’t very complicated, but for someone whose taxes are likely more difficult because of different life circumstances, they could miss stuff.
The Other Steve
At issue here is the fact that it’s rather difficult to take Republicans seriously who claim someone didn’t pay enough taxes.
For years they’ve been telling everybody that they pay too much in taxes, and normally they’d be cheering this guy on.
These complaints are obviously entirely partisan in nature. They wanted to find one of Obama’s picks to fight over. They tried Holder and that failed. Now they’re trying this guy… but the fact is he’s more qualified than anybody Bush had in the position. (not surprisingly, since Bush put campaign contributors in charge rather then qualified bankers and economists)
Napoleon
@Samuel:
Dude, you lost, he is now the Treasury Secretary.
The Moar You Know
@Samuel: Wow. You’re very concerned.
Shade Tail
@Samuel:
…
The man made a mistake, which (as you (probably deliberately) fail to point out) he freely acknowledged and corrected. And **YOU**, who are incoherently sputtering and hyperventilating over absolutely nothing, say that **WE** are the tin-foil-hat-wearing Kool-Aid drinkers?
You must be a republican. Only a republican could be so ironically un-self-aware. Now calm down, and stop projecting your own failings onto us.
Brian J
Assuming the political climate doesn’t reverse entirely, I think the Democrats having 67 Senate seats is entirely possible, though not necessarily likely. Assume that they keep all of the ones they have now, whether the people currently holding the seats are retiring (Kaufman in Delaware) or will survive any primary challenges and win the general election (Gillibrand in New York), and that Franken is seated, and I believe we start with 59 seats, including two Independents. Now assume that, because of of a crappy political climate, inability to field good candidates because of that climate, and the laziness you cited above, we could win in Missouri, Ohio, Florida, Lousiana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Kentucky. Throw in another seat or two that might be vulnerable for some odd reason–a retirement or death, local conditions that make voters sour on the incumbent–and it’s definitely possible.
Brian J
I generally agree, particularly when the person went out of his way to correct the problems, although I guess you could say that I have a dog in this fight. You see, when I was supposed to file my first return, my mother’s boyfriend did her taxes and mine, but I forgot to mail them in. I found this out when I called up the IRS the next year when I did them on my own and they had no AGI for the previous year on file. (BTW, it was a breeze to be on the phone with them. Seriously, it took less than five minutes, and the lady was very personable.)
I guess you could classify me as a tax cheat, even though the mistake occurred when I was still in college and probably owed little to nothing in taxes. But, should I grow up to be a competent, qualified individual to be considered for a cabinet post, this should be enough to take me out of the running…right?
gopher2b
Off topic but this is not how you conduct a cross-examination. "If yes-well….." Wow. Idiots.
gopher2b
Except he clearly knew he owed it and deliberately didn’t pay it. Keep in mind, he was audited and the statute of limitations only extended back to ’03-’04 so he was free and clear on ’01-’02 until Obama picked him and he paid it for political reasons.
Fencedude
@gopher2b:
…and? He didn’t have to pay for those years. If the government told you that you had messed up your taxes, but you didn’t have to pay for two of the years, would you VOLUNTEER to give them the money anyway? Absent unusual circumstances (like becoming Treasury Secretary, in which case he did go pay those years anyway)
KevOH
Another point that has been made by republicans was that Geithner made the mistake for 4 years, but only 2 of the years were reviewable by the IRS. So when he paid off his mistake to the IRS it was only for half the amount he theoretically would’ve owed. So the Republican argument is that he should’ve given the IRS twice as much as they requested, to cover the 2 years that weren’t reviewable.
Now I may be in a unique position here, but I actually tried to give a tax collection agency more money than required in my returns. I filed a return with the city of Detroit and had a refund of about $5. I dutifully filled out the return, but on the line where I needed to add the amount refunded I wrote zero with the comment "Keep it you need it more than I do." Well about 9 months later I received the $5 with interest and a separate letter of apology from the Detroit Taxation Office.
So my misguided attempt to slip the city an extra couple of bucks probably cost them hundreds. The same thing probably would’ve happened to Geithner had he tried to overpay as the republicans have suggested.
RememberNovember
Gotta love leading, contrarian backwards ass logic
"So I made a left turn"
"You didn’t make a right turn"
"No I made a left turn"
"So you didn’t go right"
"I just fucking told you i turned left!"
wtf?
of course this doesn’t apply in states where you can’t make a left against traffic and have to turn right into a jug-handle…
Jug Handle Logic, that’s what it is.
gopher2b
@Fencedude:
Whether you would pay it is not the issue. The issue is whether it was deliberate fraud and it clearly was. So, your argument, although true, is completely irrelevant.
Now, I don’t know if Geitner should be Treasury Secretary or not because I don’t know if he is truly the "only" person in the entire country that can do this job right now. I doubt it. What I do know is that (1) the man who is going to head the IRS deliberately did not pay payroll taxes for four years, (2) the man that oversaw the greatest bank collapse in the history of the world is going to be in charge of rebuilding it. So, yes I have serious questions about both his character and his judgment. His ability to game the system (and apparently not very well) does not impress me.
Besides, I care less about his tax fraud then his role in the Fed last summer and fall. I would have much rather seen three days of questions about why Lehman was allowed to fail, why the TARP program seems to have been built around the premise that Goldman Sachs needed to be saved, and why they waited so long to do anything at all. It should have taken 30 minutes to establish that he deliberate evaded payroll taxes. Instead, because our Senators are mostly idiots, they spent four days on the easiest topic.
DaveB
Let’s not try to explain it, sugar-coat it, these people are lying sacks of shit
Fencedude
@gopher2b:
The issue is whether it was deliberate fraud and it clearly was
Except for the part where it wasn’t.
Al Swearengen
You’d think that Republicans had learned from the election that the "sell-by" date was long past on these superficial fucking trivialities they love, just love, to get all flushed about.
Message to right-wingers: Your stupid little fainting act over trivialities doesn’t work when the world is on fire.
Tsulagi
No seems to be always the safe default position in the new millennium. Christ, “movement conservatives” even sounds like a load of shit in motion.
Pretty much say whatever brain synapses still firing tells them gives maximum benefit today regardless of cost tomorrow. And doing so with a clear conscience. Even for some with the capacity, unlike our recent co-deciders, to recognize and sort truth from untruth.
It’s a matter of faith. Some believe when a priest says some holy words cheap wine becomes the blood of Christ. Maybe not literally, but in all other ways.
For observant wingnuts, the holy words are “The Democrats are always Worse.” Saying those magical words transforms any bullshit they blow out their ass into truth. Reality. Any retarded nation building incompetence into brilliance. Those truths are written in the books of the Wingnut Bible the godless evildoer MSM and Democrats keep hidden as part of their hate America agenda.
gopher2b
@Fencedude:
Apparently you are waiting for him to say that he did it deliberately and anything short of that does not persuade you. Well, okay. That’s pretty dumb.
The facts are that the IMF told him it wasn’t paying his payroll taxes, Geitner is clearly not stupid, and he did not pay the IMF’s portion.
Everyone with a brain knows that you are responsible for the "employer’s" payroll taxes if the employer doesn’t pay them. In fact, of all the things in the tax code that can screw people up…this should not be one of them. It’s pretty basic stuff.
mcsey
Hey, remember that time that Geithner briefed Congress on the way the IMF does their payroll taxes before he worked at the IMF? Yeah, that was a fun day.
I understand that the point is Red State douchery, but this time it seems they have a little something to be douchy about.
terry chay
Actually the returns are for four years at the IMF, two of which were filled out incorrectly using TurboTax and two of which were filled out incorrectly by an accountant. It’s apparently a common mistake due to a obscure witholding exemption that affects certain international organization—two were caught and correct by the IRS earlier; the other two caught and corrected by Obama’s team during the vetting process. All caught before the Republicans and right wingers got a hold of it.
It’s amazing to see how bulletproof the Democrats are now. All those thirty years in the wilderness count for something. Ahh, so this is competence!
gopher2b
@mcsey:
Wow. He sought received reimbursement for taxes he didn’t pay. Anyone who thinks this was an "honest mistake" is a moron.
I totally agree with you regarding Red State. Some people on this board are apparently struggling with the idea that both Red State can be douche bags and our new Treasury Sec. is a tax fraud. They are not mutually exclusive.
deadrody
Good one. The only way to lead TurboTax to do the wrong thing is to LIE to it.
And the Republicans are the ones with the truth problem. Hysterical
John Cole
I swear to ALLAH that the average right-wing commenter and the rest of the concern trolls here need a course in remedial reading comprehension. I’m not defending Geithner, and of course there are/were issues at play regarding his behavior and actions.
The point is- WHY DIDN’T RED STATE RAISE THOSE INSTEAD OF LYING? Clearly those issues exist, instead of raising them, they lie about him blaming his problems on turbo tax, which he clearly did not.
Why? Because they are, as I have said, fundamentally incapable of telling the truth.
cleek
@John Cole: evs. it’s not about the truth, it’s about tarnishing Obama.
gopher2b
@John Cole:
I don’t think anyone on here disagrees with that point. It appears the conversation merely drifted into discussing the merits of Geitner’s appointment.