Change you can’t file correctly

I don’t know if this is the kind of change Obama had in mind when he nominated Tim “taxes are hard” Geithner as Treasury Secretary.

Last week, a flurry of news reports noted Geithner’s comments about TurboTax. As background, he was grilled about failing to pay more than $34,000 in payroll taxes earlier this decade.

Politically, I’m a simple man … I want a small government that does a few things well, spending the rest of its time serving as a referee when people have been done wrong via force or fraud. No bailouts, no mountains of debt and no crazy schemes trying to implement “fairness” in broadcasting.

So nothing illustrates the complexity of our tax code than the inability of the man nominated to run the US Treasury Department being unable to correctly file his taxes with the aid of tax preparation software.

Some people see this as part of the political process they want to see changed in the Obama administration. I see it as an opportunity for a high ranking monetary official to admit to America that our tax code is too complex and push for a real change … perhaps something simple.

Then again, maybe it’s too optimistic to think that government will change by deciding to get out of the way and make life simpler for the citizens that supposedly grant it power.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …