Tipping the tax man

With President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Federal Reserve having made a mistake that most owner-operators could have helped him avoid, we pause now before the impending vote by the Senate Finance Committee on whether to confirm Timothy Geithner to the post to issue a recommendation and a question:br /br /1. Truck owner-operators or other self-employed citizens have for years been under the burden of filing quarterly estimated payments of taxes, reconciled with real earnings at tax time. It’s not a system so complicated that Mr. Geithner shouldn’t have been able to navigate it, but perhaps there’s a need to fix it to decompartmentalize Social Security, Medicare, and income taxes to at least make the overall tax and its filing simpler (and why not reduce the overall rate for the self-employed while we’re at it to encourage small business).br /2. Without separation of the income and self-employment taxes, wouldn’t that make it more difficult for the legion of folks out there who fail to pay the tax — whether out of willful negligence, malice or just plain negligence (as appears to be the case with Geithner) — to continue doing so for four years undetected by the IRS?br /br /li class=”social-digg”a onclick=”window.open(‘http://digg.com/submit?phase=2amp;url=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title), ‘digg’); return false;” href=”http://digg.com/submit”Digg/a/lili class=”social-facebook”a onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+’amp;title=’+encodeURIComponent(document.title),’facebook’); return false;” href=”http://www.facebook.com/share.php”facebook/a/lidiv class=”blogger-post-footer”Channel 19 is the blog version of the column of the same name featured in Overdrive: The Voice of the American Trucker. Todd Dills (tdills@rrpub.com) is its author./div