And now we find out they owe BACK TAXES?

The late famed witch / hotel queen Leona Helmsley is reported to have said, "Only the little people pay taxes."

In today's news is this AP report:

"At least 13 companies receiving billions of dollars in bailout money owe a total of more thean $220 million in unpaid federal taxes, a key lawmaker [Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga] said Thursday."

One of these companies owed $113 million from 2005 and 2006. Another owed $102 million from before 2004. And yet, according to the AP, all recipients of government bailout funds had to sign a contract stating that they did not owe any back taxes. In other words, these companies, or their representatives, LIED.

But they got their money anyway. They got their money from a treasury secretary who has had to pay $43,200 so far to cover back taxes, interest and penalties for taxes he "forgot" to pay between 2001 and 2004. I'll bet that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wouldn't even have ponied up the money if he hadn't been caught during his confirmation hearings.

Enough about Geithner. He's already a national embarrassment, who ought to do the honorable thing, resign and go home. Let's go back to the bailout beneficiaries.

Why should we give any government money, funds from the public trust, to anyone who has not paid the government their dues, who has basically swindled the government, and then LIED about it? Don't give them a cent!

Living here in small-town America, we have seen what happens to individual taxpayers and to small businesses when they don't pay their taxes. The IRS comes down on them like a ton of bricks.

I guess once you're "too big to fail," you're also too big to pay taxes, right?

This is the spot where I should insert several fragrant expletives.

This entire bailout fiasco is going to turn into a huge scandal. It will taint the Obama presidency, and it will permanently taint the reputations of many, many people in the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, as well as many titans of industry. Oh sure, they'll all get rich out of it, but their names will be mud for the rest of their lives. The American public, the "little people" who pay taxes, will have lost the last dregs of respect for, and trust in, all of these people.