Heh… Taegan Goddard of Political Wire is calling the Romney campaign’s new defense of “Romney retroactively retired from Bain” the “worst talking point ever”.
I disagree that it is “a lot of irrelevance blowing in the wind.” Romney himself made it relevant by citing his experience at Bain as qualification for the White House. Then, when people ask him about that experience, he says that he wasn’t there when the nasty stuff happened. So, what experience does he have at Bain that would make him a good president? Damned if I know.
trust me Romney is not hiding the fact that he didn’t pay his full tithing. Fact is he will probably get a lot of flack for donating to the church at all like they did when he released one year. Heck he couldn’t even go on a his mission without people saying he dodged the draft.
Ministering to the pagans of Paris? Not exactly Albert Schweitzer fending off tsetse flies, now is it?
I think that Romney’s tax returns pass the IRS scrutiny test. That said, I don’t think they would pass the Joe Sixpack test. For example, how did he get so much money in is IRA? One explanation is that his Bain Capital stock were put in there at nominal value.
Speaking of Bain Capital stock, how did Mitt get 100% of it? I mean there were other founders and they leveraged Bain to a certain extent. I mean, it would be like the Koch Brothers or Bechtel letting someone set up a hedge fund on their coattails and not getting a cut from it. Doesn’t make any sense.
I used to work for Swiss Bank Corporation and am a little familiar with why people use off shore bank accounts. I’d be shocked, shocked I tell you, if Mitt didn’t have a numbered account set up back in the 80’s when it would have been child’s play. But I digress, you set up an offshore account primarily to obfuscate what you are doing. It may be perfectly legal, but there are advantages. Otherwise, you would back through a US bank.
might seem strange to you but it is a very important part of the lds faith and has been since it’s founding. If the practice had just begun during the Vietnam war maybe you could make a case.
Well, LOL, it’s just about as stupid, LOL, as wanting to hunt down and kill all the evil, immoral rich guys.
Once again we see the populist fallacy that life is a zero-sum game, and that the rich couldn’t have gotten that way without exploiting the poor. It was bullcrap when Marx said it, and it’s bullcrap now.
Actually, kaylasdad99 was talking about Romney’s offshore bank accounts, not his time at Bain. Or not at Bain. Or retroactively not at Bain. Or…
Ok, if you say so… It’s all bullcrap. There was never any cheating. The rich would never cheat or exploit anything. Silly me for even questioning someone so obviously superior. I’ll return to my place now, sir, and not hunt and kill the rich like I was planning, now that you’ve shown me the light.
Or you could prove it.
I read something interesting this morning about this whole Bain issue and why the Obama campaign is hammering so hard on it. They know that it’ll likely be old news in a week or two and everybody will have moved on to the new “shiny thing.” What the Obama campaign is really trying to do is to make it so you can’t think of Bain without thinking of things like “retroactive retirement” and the like… basically making it an easy late night punchline. If they can turn Romney into a joke going into the conventions, it’s going to be hard for him to turn around that narrative and to get people to take him seriously.
It won’t be. We won’t be talking about this issue forever, but there should be plenty of ads about Bain and Romney’s finances in swing states as the election approaches. Romney can’t make people stop talking about it because his business experience is central to his campaign, and he evidently feels that releasing his tax returns would be even worse than this, which guarantees people will keep talking about it.
Since he must have figured that releasing the returns would be more damaging than not releasing them, it must be that there is a treasure trove of damaging fodder that he doesn’t want Obama to get his hands on.
For once I have to hand it to the Democrats- if you want to win you have to define your opponent before he can define himself and turn his strength into a weakness. There has been significant damage done to Romney last week. I predict the polls will start showing that shortly. The best thing that Romney has going for him is that the Olympics will give us a two week break from the campaign.
Yea, good thing there isn’t anyway for pundits to tie discussions about Romney into their Olympic coverage.
I have a question. If you wanted to come up with the most stereotypical 1%er (i.e. the bogeyman that the Occupy movement rants about), could you come up with anybody better than Mitt Romney?
Do you think that the ridiculous straw-manning that you are prone to actually helps your case?
Or do you actually think that anyone who levies a critique at a wealthy person actually wants to take their wealth away, or thinks that we should murder them?
Really, it simply makes you look foolish.
Romney’s whole argument is that he’s qualified for president based on his business acumen. Yet he won’t tell us exactly what he did as a businessman. It’s pretty clear that he would do as president what he did as a businessman: ship jobs overseas, raid pensions meant for ordinary people and then lobby to lower already low taxes more on really rich people. And not much else.
I’ve had my issues with Obama but the last weeks have done much to convince me to go to the polls and vote. If the Dems are smart they’ll keep it up. Romney is every asshole boss we’ve ever had. He’s every jerk who laid off some people, asked others to work harder to make up for it and then turned around and rubbed the fact that he paid a lower tax rate than we do in our faces. He’s every boss who told us there was no money for raises or health care coverage for our kids yet there was company money to buy him a new car.
That’s not a good image for the Reps to project.
Hmmmmm.
Dick Cheney.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were years where he didn’t pay one cent in taxes. Explaining that it was perfectly legal would actually make that worse, because it puts the spotlight on wheeler-and-dealer loopholes and utterly undercuts the Republican narrative that the “job creators” need tax relief.
There’s just no way to spin that. Stand his ground and defend the loophole abuse, and he cranks his out-of-touch zillionaire image up to eleven. Offer mealy-mouthed platitudes about reining in the abuses, and he cranks his phony panderer image up to eleven. Credibly promise to end the abuses, and he betrays his big-money constituency.
So, how isn’t it? Can two people simultaneously own and operate the same yacht?
Just a speculation.
What if Romney participated in the offshore voluntary disclosure initiative? Presumably that would show up in his previous tax returns somewhere?