Romney’s tax returns—just the break the Obama camp was waiting for?

[a35362]

I wonder if Romney eats arugula and drinks bottled water?

[Measure_for_Measure]

@a35362

I wonder if Romney eats arugula and drinks bottled water?

Romney is the embodiment of all the bogus claims flung at John Kerry back in 2008. Ironically.

You can’t hang out with Romney: his small talk has a car salesman feel. He’s a serial flip flopper. He’s an out of touch elitist. He’s a glad-handling robot without the warmth. Romney also has solid analytic skills and reportedly runs focused meetings. But he’s not really running on the basis of his strengths, because the base doesn’t want high fallutin’ analysis of the nation’s problems. Romney knows this: so for example he never found it necessary to bone up on his foreign policy, like GWBush did. He just practiced his talking points and applause lines.

[Simplicio]

He obviously needs to buy a ranch in Texas, ASAP.

[BobLibDem]

@Lamar_Mundane

Since his parents are still alive, he technically hasn’t “inherited” anything from them. That’s not to say that they haven’t set him up in his own cozy lifestyle, with money and property and a nice job.

No they aren’t. Lenore Romney died in 1998, George in 1995.

[Little_Nemo]

@Measure_for_Measure

Romney is the embodiment of all the bogus claims flung at John Kerry back in 2008. Ironically.

You can’t hang out with Romney: his small talk has a car salesman feel. He’s a serial flip flopper. He’s an out of touch elitist. He’s a glad-handling robot without the warmth.

And don’t forget, he speaks French.

[wonky]

@BobLibDem

No they aren’t. Lenore Romney died in 1998, George in 1995.

Makes me wonder what Lamar Mundane knows and when he knew it!

[BigAppleBucky]

Mittford has a load of overseas stashes. That may be why we won’t see his old tax returns.

Investigation: Mitt Romney’s Offshore Accounts, Tax Loopholes, and Mysterious...

Even so, these provided a lavish smorgasbord for Romney’s critics. Particularly jarring were the Romneys’ many offshore accounts. As Newt Gingrich put it during the primary season, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.” But Romney has, as well as other interests in such tax havens as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

snip

These, plus the mandatory financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics and released last August, raise many questions. A full 55 pages in his 2010 return are devoted to reporting his transactions with foreign entities. “What Romney does not get,” says Jack Blum, a veteran Washington lawyer and offshore expert, “is that this stuff is weird.”

The media soon noticed Romney’s familiarity with foreign tax havens. A $3 million Swiss bank account appeared in the 2010 returns, then winked out of existence in 2011 after the trustee closed it, as if to remind us of George Romney’s warning that one or two tax returns can provide a misleading picture. Ed Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California, says the Swiss account “has political but not tax-policy resonance,” since it—like many other Romney investments—constituted a bet against the U.S. dollar, an odd thing for a presidential candidate to do. The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline “Value: not disclosed in tax returns.”

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Willard’s IRA is said to be worth $105,000,000. That’s a heck of a sum considering the maximum contribution is $30,000 and he only worked for ten years. The guess is he stashed assets into the fund worth far more than $30K each year, the valuations being numbers he himself picked. Of course, he’ll do his utmost to keep this all secret.

[CJJ]

@BigAppleBucky

Willard’s IRA is said to be worth $105,000,000. That’s a heck of a sum considering the maximum contribution is $30,000 and he only worked for ten years. The guess is he stashed assets into the fund worth far more than $30K each year, the valuations being numbers he himself picked. Of course, he’ll do his utmost to keep this all secret.

I also heard this figure. It seemed unbelievable, so even though I generally trust Vanity Fair I had to find out more. The Wall Street Journal reported on this last January and stated that Romney “has between $20.7 million and $101.6 million in it, a big chunk of his fortune”:

Experts on estate planning said it is highly unusual to accumulate such a considerable sum in an IRA, an investment vehicle restricted by annual contribution limits. It appears that Mr. Romney’s grew so large mostly because it holds investments in Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he helped start.

Under federal law, Mr. Romney isn’t required to pay annual taxes on the account’s investment gains, and the bulk of his contributions to the fund are likely to have been pretax dollars, IRA experts say. As such, the Romney IRA has enabled the current Republican front-runner to defer paying taxes on a sizable portion of his wealth—although he could face high tax bills when he eventually withdraws the money.

So, this is a tax deferment strategy. Any chance this “unfair” taxation of IRA’s jumps to the top of his domestic agenda if he wins the election?

I also like the quote from a Romney aide who said the tax treatment for his IRA “is the same for Gov. Romney as it is for every citizen of the U.S.” Someone once said that the law. This reminds me of something Anatole France once said: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”