In my opinion the reason it’s a big issue is not why he originally lied about it, which I find kind of stupid, but rather that he blatantly lied to the American people in the first place.
There’s already ample evidence he was still head of Bain for years after he claimed and the current excuse is he retired “retroactively”. It’s definitely no mole hill. At the least Romney has allowed his major professional achievement become a negative by needlessly lying about when he quit.
(h) Difficult to explain the business deductions for blood of newborn infants.
Maybe he took advantage of one or more of the tax incentives in Obama’s stimulus plan and got stimulated.
They were needed to maintain the flesh latices of his cyborg… er… uh.. for cosmetic reasons. Yeah… That’s the ticket. For cosmetic reasons. (why do you think he bought that fetus disposal company… you don’t really think he’d let them dead babies go to waste, do you?
I heard from someone who cleaned the house of a guy that invested in Bain that Romney’s Chinese Wind Turbine Factory took stimulus dollars to hire low wage Indian employees who were used to flood the Internet with anti-solar and anti-coal blogs so that people would stick with his Iranian Oil or Chinese Turbines. Now, obviously, I can’t tell you who told me that or even if they think it’s true, but I’ve sent all of this to ABC. So don’t be surprised if it’s on the News tonight.
Continuing the theme of Romney, and all his top advisers (the putative future Cabinet and WH staff) being too thin-skinned even for a campaign, much less governing: Fehrnstrom compares Reid to McCarthy for claiming Romney paid no taxes for 10 years.
It would be easy to refute the assertion, of course, but dudgeon is just more fun.
I thought this also, but see my link in post #6. If it were known that the IRS did not check valuations of things moved into gifts and IRAs he could have done something that everyone was getting away with. I don’t know if it is technically illegal, but there are penalties and it sure stinks.
He is only damned if he does and doesn’t because there is something fishy about his returns. If they all looked like the current return the problem would blow over very quickly. Too bad Nixon isn’t in the White House - we’d have those returns leaked by tomorrow.
He was still CEO of Bain during this period, and that is slightly different from being a silent partner. I don’t know what their bylaws look like, but the CEO usually has some specified duties and responsibilities. Since he was getting a salary, either he was getting lots of money for nothing or was not a silent partner. Too bad SarbOx was not in effect then, because if it was he’d have to sign off on lots of stuff.
It is not hard for the lawyers to change the CEO, so there is no excuse that they just didn’t get around to it.
I’d still be suspicious of his supposed lack of involvement considering his ownership position, but this is different.
My guess is that for small companies like Bain they have lots of rules but no one really lets them get in the way of doing what they want to do. Would Romney show the same lack of respect for the laws of the nation as president?
I suspect he stayed as CEO in order to justify getting the money, even though he already had lots. He is a greedy little shit, isn’t he?
This is why it seems so probable that there is something pretty bad in there. He can refute the rumors so easily by releasing the returns. And it’s why I think it must be pretty bad. He’ll wait until just before the election to release anything. People kept voting for George Bush after it was revealed that he was a convicted criminal. People tend to have their minds made up by October, and when whatever he’s done is revealed, he’ll get all indignant and call the charges a smear, and it won’t have a big impact on the election.
Well, Romney thought $300,000 in public speaking fees was a trifle, so $100,000 for a nominal position probably didn’t seem like a big deal either. But I think his campaign’s position is that he was required to sign some SEC forms because he was the guy nominally in charge and that his involvement didn’t go further than that.
In regards to Reid, he’s making stuff up. Or he’s incredibly stupid. His source would not have access to Romney’s tax returns, assuming the source even exists. My guess would be that Reid is just using a ploy to get Romney to release the returns, or to cast such a shadow over the issue that Romney loses ground in the polls by refusing to do so.
Unlike in SMDB, lying is A-OK in politics. Even if Reid is caught with his pants on fire, there will be no consequences to his credibility.
It was incredibly stupid even if he wasn’t making it up. He had no basis for passing on that rumor and no way to know if it was true (which it probably isn’t).
Reid was just asking questions–you got a problem with that?
I’d bet money that it isn’t true. But it’s a genius piece of muckraking anyway. Make the sonofabitch deny it and so forth.
There is no situation where Romney can win this. If he doesn’t release the returns, these kind of speculations can keep hitting. After all as stated above, people are just asking questions.
The only way to stop this is to release the returns. If there was ANY politically viable way to do that, he would have done it already. Ergo, there are some majorly damaging things in those documents. I doubt there is anything technically illegal (I don’t think Romney is too smart to avoid that, but I would hope he was just smart enough to hire people smarter than him). Its worse than that - its probably ALL legal, and that’s the problem. It makes him look even more like a rich fat cat gaming the system in a way that Joe Schmoe could never do.
It doesn’t work so well if you wind up looking like a bigger jerk than the sonofabitch. If Reid fell short of that, it’s only because the tax issue has been around for a while and Reid’s comments will be forgotten by the weekend.
I don’t agree that Reid looks like a jerk, but stipulate that’s an opinion where reasonable people may disagree.
Is it? He said somebody who invested with Bain told him Mitt Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. We don’t know who that person is or if there’s any reason to think this person has a clue what he’s talking about - or of course if the person exists in the first place. That’s not much of a basis for suggesting a guy cheated on his taxes for a decade, and it’s a bullshit way to try to get him to release the returns. It’s true that Republicans did this to Obama regarding his birth certificate and that issue was even stupider and much-longer lived, but still.
[quote=“Marley23, post:55, topic:630085”]
Republicans did this to Obama regarding his birth certificate and that issue was even stupider and much-longer lived[\QUOTE]
This.
Sauce for the goose, right?
Now “B-b-b-b-b-but that’s UNFAAAAAAAIR!”
Always was.
Well, it is Ok with me for the Dems to refrain from jumping into the muck with the Birthers and the rest of unethical loons.
How many years worth of taxes do Presidential candidates traditionally release? How many did Obama release in 2008, or Kerry in 2004, or Bush in 2000?
You’re all wrong. The taxes will show that he has been secretly funding the Applied Sciences branch of Bain and is, in fact, Batman
Remember it is $100K plus. They were not required to report his actual salary.
Remember the cruise ship which hit the rock. Perhaps the Captain should have said that he was only nominally in charge, and he had actually retroactively resigned just before the cruise began.
But I’m sure you are right that he considers his salary as a trifle. That’s his problem, and that’s what all this stuff is showing.