Obama admits mistake

So yesterday, President Obama admitted, in an interview with Fox News, that he made a "mistake" in the recommendation of Tom Daschle's Cabinet nomination. In case you missed the story, Mr. Daschle caught flak for revelations that he had failed to pay more than $130,000 in taxes. He is the latest in a series of Cabinet nominees that seem to have trouble in paying their taxes according to the IRS guidelines. "I consider this a mistake on my part, one that I intend to fix and correct and make sure that we're not screwing up again," Obama said. "So this is a mistake -- probably not the first one I'm going to be making in this office, but what I'm absolutely committed to doing is fixing it," he said. So here's what I like about President Obama so far. He wants his presidency to be transparent. He admits his mistakes. And he vows to learn from his mistakes to make sure he doesn't do them again in the future. What I also liked about the Tom Daschle incident pertaining to taxes is this statement: "We can't send a message to the American people that we've got two sets of rules -- one for prominent people and one for ordinary people," Obama said, defending his administration's standards. So this begs the question. If these very smart, very prominent, very high profile people like Daschle, Geithner, and others, have problems paying their taxes, what about the rest of us? Did they not pay because they just thought they could get away with it? Or did they not get good tax advice? We can assume that they did not take their taxes to H & R Block, or do them their selves on TurboTax, so what's the deal? Isn't it time that the IRS was told to make the preparation of personal income taxes easier for everyone? There are of course, many alternate tax proposals out there, from the flat tax to a national sales tax, to the European value-added tax system, and on and on. I think if we could get everyone to be able to do a 1040 EZ style form, that would be great. So I do hope President Obama learns from this mistake and uses it to give us real tax reform, easier income tax filing for all Americans. He better hurry, April 15th is right around the corner!