I know there are bigger issues facing the nation, but this one really rubs me raw.

Nearly half a million federal employees and retirees didn’t bother to pay their taxes in 2007, a Washington, D.C., radio station reported a few days ago. These scofflaws have stiffed the federal treasury for $3.5 billion.

Nearly 172,000 of them are current government employees; 37,753 are active duty military personnel and roughly 200,000 are government retirees.

Sure, $3.5 billion is just a drop in the bucket compared to the $85 billion the Federal Reserve is pumping into AIG, the giant insurance company, to keep it out of bankruptcy. And it is just a fraction of the $100 billion the Fed has committed to inject into both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, if needed, to help them fend off financial collapse.

Compared to those raids on the federal treasury, $3.5 billion might not seem like much money. But when those whose salaries and benefits are paid with federal tax dollars don’t pay their taxes, that really makes my blood boil.

The biggest number of these income tax dodgers work for the U.S. Postal Service, according to WTOP Radio, which used the federal Freedom of Information Act to get this data from the Internal Revenue Service. Their domination of the ranks of this list gives new meaning to the term “going postal.”

But the award for tax-evading chutzpah has to go to the 58 members of the Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House Office, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council. The radio station said they stiffed the federal treasury for $319,978 in 2007.

Imagine that. These people work directly for the president – the man who has sworn to protect and defend the constitution and uphold the laws of the land – and they didn’t pay their taxes. You’ve got to wonder why they’ve been allowed to keep their government jobs.

If you think all of this is just a one-year aberration, you’re wrong. Two years ago, WTOP used the FOIA to find out how many federal employees didn’t file income tax returns for 2005. That group shorted the federal treasury $2.8 billion.

Then, as with the 2007 group, postal workers were the biggest offenders. Nearly 57,000 of them accounted for unpaid taxes of $320 million in 2005. And 71 employees of the president’s executive office staff didn’t pay their taxes that year.

This is the kind of arrogance you would expect from government workers in a third-rate dictatorship, where the leaders and their close supporters treat the national treasury as their own piggy bank. But in this case government employees aren’t pilfering the nation’s coffers; they’re ducking their obligation to contribute to it.

Of course, getting them to pay the IRS what they owe won’t put much of a dent in the nation’s $9.5 trillion national debt. But it will be a move in the right direction. The financial crisis that has wracked Wall Street hasn’t hit bottom yet. Morgan Stanley and the Goldman Sachs Group, the giant investment firms, are now struggling to survive. If the Fed is forced to come to their rescue the cost to taxpayers will be enormous.

Even without that worst-case scenario, the demand on the treasury – and American taxpayers – is going to push the nation into a deeper federal deficit.

It’s going to take some crafty financial management to lift the nation out of this bog and, yes, taxpayers will have to bear the cost of this recovery. As regrettable as this is, it’s understandable.

What is neither understandable nor acceptable is the failure of federal employees – whose salaries and benefits come out of a treasury stocked by American taxpayers – to pay their taxes.