Self-employment taxes are due today.

For those of us who are our own bosses, this is equivalent to the withholding tax that automatically gets deducted from regular employees’ paychecks. Every 90 days, we each must mail the IRS our checks for an estimated 25 percent of the next annual tax return.

This quarterly ritual is miserable enough, especially in this bludgeoned economy, without the recent news that Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner escaped our pain. Geithner — former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an architect of the still-unfolding federal bailout of seemingly any big business that asks politely — failed to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from 2001 to 2004. During his tenure at the International Monetary Fund, the IMF did not withhold payroll taxes, which were Geithner’s responsibility.

Now that he has paid $42,702 in back taxes and interest, the music Geithner most likely will face is some John Phillip Sousa march that a brass band will play as he is sworn in as America’s next treasury secretary. Then he will supervise the very same IRS he neglected for four years.

America truly is the land of the second chance.

Taxpayers, self-employed and otherwise, also will be thrilled to learn that two Kansas congressmen have been busy sticking it to the other 49 states, as well as the concepts of basic fairness and decency.

Democratic Representative Dennis Moore and his Republican colleague Todd Tiahrt successfully amended legislation authorizing the second half of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. This $350 billion Act II of the cornerstone bailout bill (and just a small part of Uncle Sam’s $13.35 trillion in bailout commitments) now will lack language that barred TARP-funded corporate executives from zooming around in privately owned or leased aircraft. Moore and Tiahrt complained that this provision hurt Kansas’s luxury-jet industry and its 44,000 employees.

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) agreed Tuesday to strip this language from the bill. So, these tycoons will live like gods and live on the federal dole. Chew on that the next time you remove your shoes at an airport-security line. Well-tailored corporate welfare queens will fly right over your head in Gulfstreams and giggle in their Gucci loafers.

Like so many others in these wilted-salad days, I will grind my molars to the mandible, write the IRS a check, and wonder why my fellow Americans are not in the streets demanding an end to the insults we ceaselessly endure from our oppressors in Washington.

And don’t forget: Those self-employment-tax checks must be in the mail and postmarked by midnight tonight.