Mitt Romney praised the use of tax havens to dodge U.S. taxes because it helps big corporations—and their wealthy shareholders in the top 1% (himself included)—to succeed financially. That success comes directly at the expense of middle class and low-income citizens. In a real sense, there is little difference between Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape” and the economic rape of the 99% that Romney seeks to legitimize.
When corporations and wealthy individuals, like Romney, shift and hide income overseas, ordinary citizens end up paying not only their share of the cost of public services from which they benefit—but also the cost of services that corporations and the wealthy enjoy but have skipped out of paying. In addition, services are frequently reduced hurting everyone from the middle class to the most vulnerable in the rising ranks of those in poverty. Enormous sums of income are redistributed upwards to the wealthy, and opportunities for everyone else are continually reduced.
These effects occurs not only at the federal level, but also for states where the same income shifting to tax havens enables corporations and the wealthy to avoid state income and corporate taxes. The impacts are not small but are measured in at least tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars of lost revenue from the wealthy and powerful. This writer has studied this issue professionally for decades, and while formal studies suggest that the minimum size of lost revenue begins somewhere around $70 billion annually, all studies tend to underestimate the problem because of the difficulty of measuring lost revenues from income that is being intentionally hidden through incredibly sophisticated and complex schemes.
Those are the basic economic and fiscal facts. In political and moral terms, Romney’s words praising corporate success through dodging taxes is an effort to legitimize a social harm. He is praising the process of victimizing anyone who is vulnerable in society just as surely as Akin was victimizing women vulnerable to rape. In that sense, celebrating the irresponsible and harmful behavior of the elite that enables them to dominate the less powerful is more corrosive to society and the sense of community than even the perverse economic effects of international tax sheltering.