Pat Dollard

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For sheer chutzpah, it would be hard to top the scene on Capitol Hill yesterday. As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner vowed to go after wealthy Americans who shield money in tax havens, the man wielding the chairman’s gavel in the House Ways and Means hearing was Democrat Charlie Rangel.

Perfect together. Geithner and Rangel are two peas in a pod when it comes to dodging their own taxes, and neither is embarrassed about demanding others pay up.

Their certainty about what’s good for the rest of us, combined with their sense of privilege about their own shady conduct, perfectly illustrates the real deficit in Washington. More than the budget gap, the trust deficit is causing doubts about President Obama’s big-government grab.

Wall Street’s worries weren’t eased by Obama’s claim yesterday that now is a good time to buy stocks.

His aim to dramatically expand the size and cost of government, which Geithner defended yesterday with phrases like “deep moral imperative,” ultimately means putting more power in the tainted hands of people like Geithner and Rangel.

Beyond the radical ideas themselves, his plan is a doubly tough sell because Obama is failing to keep his promises about demanding higher ethics. From his accepting the corrupting practice of earmarks to a go-along attitude toward special interest handouts and waste, the President seems very comfortable with the worst ways of Washington.

Most worrisome, his liberal supporters apparently are exempt from higher standards while all critics are routinely branded as defenders of the status quo.

This is not a demand for the perfect public servant. It is a simple statement of fact about the implications of Obama’s push for more expansive government. The enterprise depends on trust.

As power over the economy, health care and energy is centralized through unprecedented bailouts, tax hikes, mandates, borrowing and spending, the men and women who will wield that power grow in importance. Who they are matters more than ever.
Most will prove able and honest. But some won’t survive scrutiny for ethical reasons. Some won’t because they have no claim on competence.

Incredibly, Rangel and Geithner both fail on both counts.

Rangel has been in Congress since 1970, yet his Harlem district remains nearly as distressed as when he started. He is head of the nation’s tax-writing panel, but appears to have intentionally dodged taxes on $75,000 in rental income from a property he owns in the Dominican Republic. He argued for a tax break for a company whose head pledged $1 million for a college center named after Rangel.

Other issues include his below-market rents on the four apartments he got in a rent-regulated building, all part of a suspect trail that has led to an ethics probe in the House. An ordinary person would end up in a prosecutor’s sights.

So far, Obama has been silent on Rangel’s conduct. And he has put his full faith in Geithner despite a checkered past.

Geithner now preaches the religion of regulation in the financial markets, yet, in his former job, he was supposedly standing guard at the epicenter of the meltdown. As chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, he was the central bank’s eyes and ears on Wall Street. Apparently he was blind and deaf, to judge how the banks marketed toxic junk.

Meanwhile, Geithner’s personal tax history is shocking for a man now in charge of the Internal Revenue Service. His tax delinquencies, with interest and penalties, came to about $43,000, some of which he paid when he was audited in 2006 but most of which he didn’t pay until he knew Obama would give him a job.

I wonder how the agents who audited him feel about working for him?

Yet there was Geithner yesterday, talking about morals and justice and the “absolute right judgment” of the budget and going after delinquents. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

And we’re supposed to trust these guys to fix our country?