OK. I just finished a Newsweek article (30 March 2009) by Evan THomas and John Barry about all the empty posts at the top of key federal bureaucracies. Their idea is that by setting the ethical bar very high and making the vetting process feel and look like a witch hunt, those running the search for sub-cabinet posts have made it impossible to fill them. Candidates either have cheated or don’t want to find out that they have (being “best and brightest” but, apparently, not personally responsible). We lost TOm Daschle (a fact I mourn–but, really, what was he thinking?) And poor Geithner is answering his own phones, I hear, on top of all his other woes.
Well, OK, not really, but he can’t do his job right and the author blames it partly on a too high standard for the vetting process that’s keeping the offices empty when we need all hands on deck.
According to the article, we should just let these folks pay their back taxes and move in.
OK. Maybe. But looking at what Mr. Geithner has done so far (and I’m a progressive!), I’m thinking we might have done almost as well with someone a little less conventionally “best and bright” and a little more bound by the legal and ethical standards we “mediocre and low wattage” types must and usually do hold to.
The very idea of OWING 40 thousand in back taxes is inconceivable to me. My family would have had to skip the last . . . well several years I’m sure. . . to reach that number. So right away I’m out of my depth. But really (and I realize this point has been made) how does a Wall Street wizard NOT KNOW he’s missed some taxes?
If Geithner didn’t know, I submit he needs to pay more attention to his own bottom line. On the theory that ethics and management, like charity, begin at home, I suggest that rather than lower the bar we all adjust those famous moral compasses.
Pundits who continually say we’re losing top talent because they need to make 20 million dollars a year to feel satisfied that they’re really valued or because they can’t seem to get the tax laws straight, need to re-examine that argument.
For one thing, given that most people DON’T fall in that bracket, and operating on the good for goose good for gander principle, lots of people will assume this means that they, too, are sort of exempted from really toeing the line on this stuff. What does it matter if you cheat? Who loses after all? Isn’t there a big picture out there that will still look pretty good even if there’s a squashed gnat in the lower left corner?
Maybe. But a lot of dead flies and you have a plague–and you know what THAT means.
Here’s the deal: we probably do need to streamline the vetting process and maybe some dirty laundry doesn’t have to reach the news (good luck with that in the age of Facebook, My Space, et al.) But why not accompany that by adding a good moral compass–and ability to find “true north”–to the definition of best and brightest?
That it seems to me is the only way we’ll really survive this mess.
