IRS Should Audit Obama, Palin, Tina Fey, and Bruce Springsteen to Pay for Stimulus

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Let's see.

Tom Daschle, $128,000.

(The Washington Post this morning called this a "tax glitch.")

Tim Geithner, $48,000.

(Oops! Another pesky glitch!)

To tell you the truth, I'm not too surprised that these two egotistic chiselers were able to cheat the rest of us so easily.

IRS enforcement is never a priority of Republican lawmakers and administrations. Who knows what kind of "glitches" exist in the tax returns from Wall Street?

And that gave me an idea. Let's have the IRS audit Audacity and the rest of his cabinet. And the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Blago and Palin. Limbaugh, Springsteen, Fey, and Gervais. And all the brilliant ones on the Street who are buying private planes with our money to cushion their plump posteriors while we stand in line and pay extra baggage fees.

The IRS auditors may not recover enough to meet the cost of the $800 billion stimulus bill, or even the "smart" electric grid, or the AMT "patch" (don't get me started on the AMT) or Audacity's tax cut. We may only reap a couple hundred million dollars.

But hey, isn't that what it will cost to repair the national Mall in Washington, and save the Jefferson Memorial from falling into the Tidal Basin?

We can call them "Freedom Audits," and if you want to escape the inconvenience of an IRS appointment, and make a voluntary "discovery" of your "glitches," we'll let you pay your back taxes with minimal penalties.

Just a thought.

It would be somewhat tidier than the next best option, a guillotine in Farragut Square.

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