Tim Geithner has been on my mind since President Obama tapped him to be his Treasury Secretary. I’d never heard of Geithner before then, and I quickly developed an uneasy sense about him.
No one is indispensable, which is (boiled down) what most media outlets reported at the time of Geithner’s nomination. The golden-haired boy wonder who would save us ourselves and from the errors of the now discredited wise old men who got us into trouble in the first place. A man who would relieve us from having to think more than superficially about our situation for he would be able to do it for us.
Problem is, Geithner is a protege of the wise old men who created our current system. He is a young mandarin, a junior member of the decrepit financial aristocratic bureaucracy at work in the US. Geithner himself worked for Henry Kissinger right out of graduate school, in addition to also working for Robert Rubin and Larry Summers - all three of whom occupy revered positions in the mandarin aristocracy and who could help or hinder the advancement of those seeking the privileges of peerage.
These are not men who recognize anything is wrong with our financial system. These mandarins shaped the system and intend to thrive within it well beyond the term of any particular naive young emperor who might want to change the system.
I suspect that the young Geithner is more interested in pleasing the mandarins than he is in pleasing his president. It’s not that he’s a “bad guy” - I really have no insight on that - but that his perspective is shaped by a deep desire to be one of the mandarins. If his motivation is to please the old men, the perspective he has and the questions he asks will not be generated out of a commitment to the work; rather, they will be generated out of a need for respect. Forget about independent thought.
It is not just Geithner’s motivations that are suspect: his character is as well, as revealed in his response to discovery of his failure to pay the appropriate amount of federal tax in the early part of this decade. (We can not ever really know whether he knew he was evading federal taxes at the time that he filed them, so we extend to him the benefit of the doubt.)
For the tax years for which the statute of limitations had not yet expired, Geithner paid the delinquent taxes plus a penalty. For the two prior years, for which the statute of limitations had expired and for which he therefore was not legally bound to pay the taxes, he did not pay them until they became at issue as a result of his nomination to be Treasury Secretary.
In other words, a high-ranking financial mandarin with past - and likely future - service in the Treasury Department decided it was okay to not pay his share of federal tax because, at the time the taxes were due, he had underpaid and now, at the time of discovery of the error, federal law no longer required him to make good on the underpayment.
So, let me get this straight. If I underpay my taxes, that’s okay so long as I don’t get caught before the statute of limitations expires.
How is this okay?
Unfortunately, it is exactly this mindset that is undermining America. Let me get away with what I can while I can and not feel obligated to the system as a whole. Hmmm, doesn’t exactly sound consistent with the philosophy embraced by our new president.
I certainly hope that Barack Obama, in his quest to do good and change the system to make it more equitable, doesn’t rely on too many people whose motivations are so contrary to his own, for it is near impossible to have them carry out your will and near impossible to cause change you can count on.