Mit Romney's Bain Tax Woes just keep getting bigger and bigger as analysts from all over the country weigh in on their suspect and perhaps illegal nature.
On Friday, in my diary Bain Tax Bombshell Bigger than Before, I tried to plow through all the documents and pull out things which might concern average voters when making a choice for President of the United States. I'm not repeating those easy ones. Read the other diary if you missed them.
My view then was, and my view today is that while some of the Romneys' deliberate Bain tax dodges might be legal under the tax code, they are immoral and unethical for someone who wishes to hold the highest office in the land.
I will again try to pull some of the money quotes as to why Mit and Ann don't want us to see their tax returns. And why Mit Romney is unsuited to be President of the United States.
CBS MoneyWatch stated on Saturday:
In a widely cited blog post Thursday, a University of Colorado law professor opined that "Bain's management fee conversions are not legal." Victor Fleischer wrote that "If challenged in court, Bain would lose."
These facts about Romney-Bain and Romney Taxes need to go viral.
And the weather has given us an extra day to do so.
Much more after the Romney Squiggle-Speak marker below.
UPDATE 1 - 2:53 pm - these are just too good not to pass up...
from the Atlanta Journal Constitution (bolding mine)
Romney, Bain dancing at outer boundaries of tax law
In 2008, a study of the technique by Gregg Polsky, a tax-law professor at the University of North Carolina, concluded that it is “extremely aggressive and subject to serious challenge by the IRS…. The tax result, if this technique is successful, is the conversion of current ordinary income into deferred capital gains. ”
UPDATE 2 - 3:47 pm - thanks to kulta1 in the comments below... I totally overlooked this important conflict:
active income deductions equals active ownership
What startles me most is that Mittens seems to take huge deductions based on active income not passive. That means he is claiming under IRS rules that he managed the companty and the investment. Someone tell me how that can be if a) he left control in 1999 as he claims and b) it is in a blind trust, for zpete's sake? Oh sorry I forget its both sides Mitt at it again. This part of the story is just breaking.
UPDATE 3 - 3:52 pm - WOW. Rec List two days in a row.
I am honored. But that isn't important. The important part is that we keep Romney's duplicity and Squiggle-Speak out in the open. We need to keep blowing away all that Bermudan and Cayman Islands sand to expose his dealings. Thanks to all of you.
UPDATE 4 - 4:02 pm - A couple of forgotten Republican tidbits someone sent me from StatesmanJournal.com (bolding mine):
“There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say ‘Have at it,’” Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, said during a July 15 broadcast of the ABC news show This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
Republican columnist George Will’s criticism of Romney’s recalcitrance was even more biting. “The costs of not releasing the returns are clear,” he said on the same show. “Therefore, (Romney) must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” Higher costs, indeed.
Mitt Romney is hiding something -- something voters really need to know before they go to the polls in November.
UPDATE 5 - 4:26 pm - People keep finding me great stuff...
from npr.org today:
Experts say Romney appears to have set up a retirement account in Bermuda with hedge fund-type investments that would otherwise be taxed in the U.S.
"We don't have full knowledge of Gov. Romney's tax situation, so we can't say for sure," says James Hines, an international tax expert at the University of Michigan, "but yeah, it looks like ... you can call it tax avoidance. You can call it facilitating investments that otherwise wouldn't be ... profitable."
UPDATE 6 - 5:52 pm - More on Mit's multiple IRS audits
I posted a response in the comments linking to the interview where Mit admits the Romney tax returns have been audited multiple times. I pointed out that Mit very carefully never revealed whether he won or lost those audits. The video and transcript are here:
WATCH: Mitt Romney Admits He's Been Audited By The IRS
but I didn't read far enough because Business Insider asked the crucial question of the Romney campaign and got the same non-answer I got from the transcript:
How many times has Romney been audited by the IRS? In what years? And what did the audits find?
We emailed these questions to the Romney campaign. Here's the response, from campaign spokesperson Ryan Williams:
“Mitt Romney has been scrupulous about observing the requirements of the tax code. Mitt Romney is in full compliance with U.S. law and he has paid 100 percent of what he has owed.”
Note that if Romney lost one or more audits and did not contest the IRS findings, what they are craftily saying would be technically correct.
If, in audit settlements and to avoid public records of tax court, the Romneys paid back taxes, penalties and interest, then he would have "paid 100 percent of what he has owed."
The only way to know the answer is to see the hidden tax returns.
UPDATE 7 - 7:18 pm - This carefully crafted non-statement should make it all crystal clear!
from Faux Noise via Politicor!
“Well, first of all, there was no reduction, not one dollar reduction in taxes by virtue of having an account in Switzerland or a Cayman Islands investment,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said in a ‘"Fox News Sunday" interview. “The dollars of taxes remained exactly the same. There was no tax savings at all.”
Reduction of what? Dollars paid to which governments?
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