Dance to the Music Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck, consistently negative about all things Obama, has a chance to dance to his own music with his recent tax problems.

Beck was quick to focus on key figures in the Obama Administration with tax issues, e.g. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

As reported by Politico, Beck said their tax issues are just one indicator of “a culture of corruption among some of the left,” Beck declared just last month in a segment on his Fox News television show, in which he branded Geithner, Killefer, Solis and a handful of other Obama nominees “tax cheats,” whom he wouldn’t trust “with my children, let alone my children's future.”

Mocking the excuses offered by the nominees, Beck sarcastically intoned: “Oh, the tax thing, it was an accident. It was my husband's fault. I didn't do it, he did it. I didn't mean to do it. I was just working hard for the people.”
So what to make, then, of the fact that Beck has had his own minor tax problems over the past few years? Basically, his tax problems seem to stem from a struggle to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.

Dean Zerbe, national managing director for a company called alliantgroup that provides specialty tax services to accounting firms, said Beck’s situation “has the look and feel of somebody who is confronting an extraordinarily complicated tax situation — or at least the people he’s hired to do these things are — and is trying to comply but isn’t doing everything perfectly.”

The same, however, could be said of most of the Obama nominees Beck has blasted for tax problems, said Zerbe, who called them “people who were trying to comply with the spirit and the intent of the law.”
“What I think would be helpful for everyone is to have is a much bigger dose of sympathy for how complicated it is to comply with the tax laws,” Zerbe urged.

Well Mr. Zerbe that kind of reason won’t sell people against the current administration, nor will it fuel the controversy that makes television show ratings. So, we minimize our tax problems and exploit those of others. That’s the way Glenn Beck plays the game.