oh... ya. Tons of politicians are now adays. I think hell will freeze over before we a election cycle free of tax cheats.
As a side note... I'd love to see what % of our countries food servers pay all their taxes. 10%?
Anyway I agree it sucks our leaders think rules are for the little people, but we get who we vote for so apparently most people in this country don't care. :-(
I offer that the tax code is so complex, and so full of incomprehensible deductions and conditions, that we are ALL "tax cheats", though we may do the math and file our returns to the best of our ability and understanding. There's simply no way to do it one hundred percent right. I also offer that people get more irritated by the hypocrisy of demagogues who work the rules to pay as little in taxes as possible - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars(as in, most of us gross much less than what "they" manage not to pay) - then get up and tell us that the
Laffer curve is bunk. Oh, and the whole "I used Turbotax and omg it like must have done bad math lol" story he gave after people started noticing his tax situation - that kind of rubs us wrong too, in a what-kind-of-fool-do-you-take-me-for kind of way :)
I'll guess that at least three out of four sit-down meals is paid for with some sort of credit card, and the vast majority of those charges include a tip(rather than tipping in cash). Most restaurant systems these days automatically record tips, making it pretty difficult to get out of reporting them. Also, restaurant servers are, again, not dictating (bad) monetary policy telling us to "eat our peas".
As to "we get who we vote for", these days we get who a shrinking number of informed, responsible, net-tax-paying citizens and a growing number of shallow, rash, non-taxpayers vote for. America will indeed get what's coming to us, but it won't be for lack of responsible people shouting "look out!".
I expect you do know this, but your wording implied otherwise so I'll just say it - nobody voted for Tim Geithner; President Obama appointed him.