Aram Zucker-Scharff

While Timothy Geithner’s tax issues are troubling, the real issue is not what he was doing when he was filing with the IRS, but what he was doing when working for the Fed on Wall Street.

Let’s get the obvious issues out of the way first. Geithner’s tax problems are severely troubling. Over several years Geithner failed to file his taxes properly, despite signing an agreement saying he would and despite the fact that he is supposed to be a financial genius. In whole, the nominee for Treasury Secretary missed out on paying over $34,000 in taxes. His supporters say that this is an honest and common mistake, yet the International Monetary Fund listed only one such mistake in the entirety of 2007, which makes Geithner’s tax mix-up an uncommon occurrence.

Despite the fact that Geithner’s whoopsie resulted in hole large enough to let a year of my tuition through, he seems to be getting off simply by saying “Oops, I guess I made a mistake for no apparent reason and then realized it just in time to pay it off right before I was nominated.”

If you think that’s a long and tortured sentence, you may just be right. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Geithner, who’s been nominated to a position that would have him heading up the IRS, is not so stupid as to have just ‘made a mistake.’ Let’s face it, if he was that dumb, would Obama really want him in the position in the first place? If I have to choose between evasive, negligent or incompetent, as Tom Blumer so plainly puts it, I’m going to choose evasive.

Our treasury secretary nominee likely cheated on his taxes. This is forgivable. Not optimal, but if you were smart enough to get away with it until being nominated to a high level of public office, you’d probably do it too.

What’s unforgivable is Geithner’s role in the $500 billion bailout and his failure as watchdog on Wall Street. Ignoring his unsavory associations with Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner’s last job was as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was responsible for overseeing Wall Street and reporting back on issues, problems and legal concerns to Bailout Bernanke and the Fed.

Then, when everything went crazy, Geithner was one of the leading architects of the bailouts of Bear Sterns, AIG and Citigroup. That means he had his hands on the shovel when our government was bailing out corrupt and incompetent banks with billions of tax-payer dollars and not bothering to keep an eye on where the flurries of newly minted cash was falling.

Gee, he doesn’t sound all that appetizing or qualified when I put it that way.

However, despite facing personal issues the likes of which have failed at least three previous presidential nominations, Geithner has been dubbed “the nomination that’s too big to fail.”

There’s a good reason for the easy treatment Geithner has gotten, as was pointed out to me, who else could we give the job to?

I don’t know, but I sure wish I did, because Timothy Geithner is not the sort of man I’d trust to do his taxes, much less the country’s.