Democrats, Media Get Punk'd: Romney Releases Tax Returns

[_Kevin Graham]

My comprehension is just fine Loran. You said, and I quote, "Romney Releases Tax Returns,"(plural) which is simply false. He released only his 2011 tax return and then provide a silly letter from his accountants who summarized what his tax returns entailed for the previous decade. I explained that this recent change of events proved nothing as far as Reid's accusations were concerned.

The only person who has been "punked" is you, since you jumped the gun with your assumption that he had actually released the tax returns requested of him. Ann already promised us that "you people" have received all we're going to get.

[_Droopy]

I don't think Mitt understands this. Which, in my opinion, is why he's unqualified to be president, not because he didn't take his full deductions (which he said would disqualify him).

Mitt Romney has spent his entire adult life creating jobs, opportunity and wealth for others, and getting paid for that service. You apparently do not understand this, which disqualifies you from any credibility as a critic of Mitt Romney's qualifications to be President in the economic realm.

Well said. In many ways, Romney is the worst candidate for the GOP because his personal story draws attention to the gross inequities of the tax code. It's one thing to hear the theoretical implications of the tax code, but when propel see a concrete example, it really drives the point home.

Plunge the class war knife deep into the nation's economic and moral tissues, and twist. Please be my guest. The fundamental problem with the U.S. tax code as it is at present, is that it exists. No one who is working, prospering, and achieving at the level his own skills, talents, and abilities can take him or her in an unhampered, free, open, competitive, growing economy should give a tinker's damn what Mitt Romney makes nor what percentage of what he makes he pays in taxes. Its not their, your, or my business, nor does it have any relation whatsoever to my own achievement and success in my own sphere.

Meanwhile, we have are being ruled by a crytpo-Marxist ideologue leading a neo-socialist political party grounded in visceral hostility to free market capitalism, property rights, and individual liberty who retain their power through the most naked, vulgar appeals to class ressentiment and collectivist in-group victimology for whom the United States tax code is the primary engine of social engineering and distribution of the scraps from their table.

[_Droopy]

My comprehension is just fine Loran. You said, and I quote, "Romney Releases Tax Returns,"(plural) which is simply false. He released only his 2011 tax return and then provide a silly letter from his accountants who summarized what his tax returns entailed for the previous decade. I explained that this recent change of events proved nothing as far as Reid's accusations were concerned.

You explained nothing. You cut and pasted some statements from some people who were engaging in freewheeling spin, speculation, conjecture, and temporizing about data and material to which they have no access or direct knowledge - just like Harry Reid.

So PwC releases "silly" letters in public, do they? Yes, they're a small, obscure (PwC is the largest professional services and financial accountancy firm in the world and the largest of the "Big Four" accountancy firms as measured by its revenues as of 2011) firm doing political hack work for a running dog capitalist oppressor who want's to be President so he can cut taxes for his rich friends at Halliburton. Actually, a quick look at the awards and honors PwC has received shows it to be, not only the world leader in financial accounting, but very fashionable left-wing where is serves their interests, as so many giant, international corporations frequently are:

Ranked #1 on Training's "Top 125" list in 2008, 2009, and 2010; inducted into Training Top 10 Hall of Fame 2011.

Received Gold Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Award 2011: Best Use of Blended Learning

PwC ranked #4 world's "Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises" in the 2010 Global MAKE study

Ranked #2 on BusinessWeek's "Best Places to Intern" list in 2008.

Ranked #3 on BusinessWeek's "Best Places to Launch a Career" list in 2008 and 2009.

Received PR News Corporate Social Responsibility Awards in two categories in 2009: Diversity Communications and Human Rights.

Received a 100% rating with the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's Corporate Equality Index in 2006-2012.

Recipient of the Employer Support of the Guard and
Reserve's (ESGR) Seven Seals Award

Recognized by G.I. Jobs as one of the 2012 Top Military Friendly Employers®

The only person who has been "punked" is you, since you jumped the gun with your assumption that he had actually released the tax returns requested of him. Ann already promised us that "you people" have received all we're going to get.

The letter, given the standing of PwC, is all that is reasonably required. But this misses the point entirely. There is not a scrap of evidence - none - that Romney has ever been in the slightest violation of U.S. tax law, and the burden of proof is on his accusers, not him, to prove their claims.

The problem is that Harry Reid looks very much like a petty, desperate, venal bald faced liar, using a shadowy unnamed snitch, who may or may not exist, and who himself would be opened up to charges of felonious activity if the claims were true (as might Reid), to smear a threat to his power and the power of the political class of which he is a part, and also a brother in the Church of which he claims to be a faithful member.

[_beastie]

Mitt Romney has spent his entire adult life creating jobs, opportunity and wealth for others, and getting paid for that service. You apparently do not understand this, which disqualifies you from any credibility as a critic of Mitt Romney's qualifications to be President in the economic realm.

You could not be more ignorant if ignorance was your life objective.

Private equity firms are not about creating jobs. They are about creating profit for investors. If that sometimes creates jobs, fine. If it sometimes destroys jobs, fine.

To say he's spent his entire adult life creating jobs is laughable. But quite on par with everything else you have to say in the realm of politics.

Perhaps an article by CNNMoney will help you. But no doubt you will dismiss it as liberal lies.

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/ ... te-equity/

Bain and its fellow buyout barons don't care in the slightest about whether they create jobs or destroy them. All they care about is making money for their investors and themselves, not necessarily in that order.

FORTUNE -- There are plenty off silly, time-wasting political arguments going on as the 2012 political campaign mercifully approaches the homestretch. But perhaps the most foolish and time-wasting involves Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mitt Romney left a dozen years ago, but from whose investments he still draws a hefty income.

Democrats, as you know, claim that Bain is a job-destroying vulture operation, which echoes what some of Romney's Republican competitors said. By contrast, Romney and his campaign claim that Bain is a noble, job-creating enterprise. Let's settle this once and for all, okay? Who's right? Neither. Despite buyouts being a numbers-intense business, there are no reliable statistics about jobs created or destroyed by private equity; no one in Buyout Land knows or wants to know about it. Bain and its fellow buyout barons don't care in the slightest about whether they create jobs or destroy them. All they care about is making money for their investors and themselves, not necessarily in that order. (Also bogus: the debate over whether Romney presided over Bain's purchase of outsourcing firms, as my colleague Dan Primack has pointed out on this site.)

If the managers think there's money to be made by expanding and improving a business that they've bought, they will try to expand and improve it. If they think they can make more money by loading additional debt onto the company and sucking out the proceeds in dividends and fees, they'll load and suck. If they think there's more money to be made by firing all the U.S. employees and moving operations to China, they'll do so in a heartbeat. They're neither moral nor immoral when it comes to U.S. jobs and U.S. society. They're amoral—they don't care one way or the other, as long as what they're doing isn't illegal.

And how did the fantabulous job creator Romney do in Mass? I've already discussed this, but will try once again. (to no avail for droopy, of course, but perhaps others are interested)

A new Obama campaign ad says the Massachusetts economy actually fared poorly during Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's four years as governor, challenging the notion that Romney knows how to fix the nation's ailing economy.

The ad says that between 2003 and 2007, Massachusetts had one of the worst economic records in the country, lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs at "a rate twice the national average, and fell to 47th in job creation."

The Obama campaign has been highlighting Massachusetts' low 2007 ranking in job creation for months, and PolitiFact has independently verified the claim.

Romney maintains his record was a bit better than that. But no one disputes that job creation during his term was pretty lackluster.


"If you take a look at the job creation experience of Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007, I don't think there is any way of getting around the fact that it was disappointing," says Michael Goodman, who teaches public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Massachusetts was at the tail end of a brutal recession when Romney took office, according to Goodman. Heavily dependent on information technology, the state had been devastated by the dot-com bust.

"We fell first and harder and faster. And so when Romney took office in early 2003, Massachusetts was still struggling, even though the nation for the most part had moved on from that experience," Goodman says.

During his term, Romney worked to try to bring businesses to the state, eventually persuading Bristol-Myers Squibb to relocate to an abandoned military base. Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told ABC's This Week on Sunday that by the time the governor left office, the unemployment rate had fallen from 5.6 to 4.7 percent.

"I have no doubt that President Obama would happily trade his 8.2 percent unemployment rate for Mitt Romney's 4.7 percent," Fehrnstrom said.

But the low unemployment rate obscures some facts.

There is no question the Massachusetts economy grew under Romney. With its highly educated population, the state gained a lot of white-collar jobs, especially in finance, technology and health care.

But like many states, it was also losing manufacturing jobs. Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, says this did not start under Romney. With its high wages and high cost of living, the state had been bleeding factory jobs for at least three decades.

In the end, Massachusetts added only about 50,000 jobs during Romney's term as governor, placing the state near the bottom in job creation.

Why did the unemployment rate fall anyway? It was partly because a lot of people moved away. During Romney's term, Massachusetts was one of only four states to lose population. When people move away, there are fewer job seekers, and the unemployment rate falls.

Widmer says this isn't necessarily Romney's fault. The state fell victim to forces beyond its control. But Romney also did not do much to reverse the trends.

"The reality, of course, is that governors don't have a lot of control over creation of jobs in one term, either on the upside or the downside," Widmer says.

Presidents may not always have much power over the economy either. But candidates for president like to tell voters they can make a difference, and voters tend to judge them on whether they do.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics ... obs-record

[_Droopy]

You could not be more ignorant if ignorance was your life objective.

Private equity firms are not about creating jobs. They are about creating profit for investors. If that sometimes creates jobs, fine. If it sometimes destroys jobs, fine.

Please see your OP, then, if I were you, I'd start doing some serious, sustained reading...and thinking. Take a few years off, Beastie. It is not possible to create new wealth for investors without creating the jobs in the various productive ventures that create that wealth (as capital gains or dividend income) for investors. Bain's success rate in saving troubled, failing businesses is around 70%, and Bain created some 100,000 jobs (and saved a number that would have disappeared had the company's Bain worked with simply failed) over the time Romney was there.

Hint: neither you nor I nor anyone else has ever gotten up in the morning and gone to work as an act of charity or to make sure that everyone we work with has a job; we do it for ourselves to make a profit, which we call "income."

Economic illiteracy of the kind you have displayed here, mixed with the the emotional class envy based anti-capitalism equally prominant, is an ultimately lethal danger to any idea of either a free or prosperous self-governing republic. Of course the purpose of Bain Capital is "about creating profit for investors" and not "about" creating jobs per se. However, since the only way to create jobs is through private investment in productive economic activity, and the existence of productive economic activity is the only means to create wealth, and jobs are required to create wealth, a small portion of which is returned to investors as capital gains or dividend income, then the motives of investors and people like Romney who attempt to rescue ailing companies and turn them into economically viable enterprises (thus saving jobs that otherwise would have disappeared completely) isn't relevant, but what they do is.

Jobs are lost in an open, free, capitalist economy because it is open, free, and growing; that is, because it is market based. It is the free market (several hundred million consumers) who determine who has a job, who doesn't, and what businesses succeed or fail. It is no one's "fault" that I don't patronize Joe's Burgers and eat frequently at Bob's Fried Chicken. I happen to like Bob's better than Joe's. If enough people agree with me that Joe's is not all that great, but Bob's is pretty good, Joe, if he does not respond to what the market is telling him (or cannot, because he just doesn't have a product that will sell, under present conditions, or is just not a competent manager), Joe will go out of business, and all of his employees will be out of a job. There is no one to "blame" here but ourselves; I and thousands of other people "destroyed" Joe's and his employees jobs.

All Bain does is try to turn around failing companies and make them profitable businesses. Jobs must be either preserved or created under such circumstances (who's running the business and who's working there? Do businesses just "create profit for their investors" through magic incantations?) At the same time, some businesses are going to have to be trimmed, scaled back, and restructured to survive, and that means layoffs, ending of product lines, scaling back of production, thinning out of management etc. That is the nature of market economics. In a scaled back, leaner, more efficient company, who determines who should be laid off and who should remain? A politician? A bureaucrat? Or the market (you and me)? How should it be determined (as a matter of what is best for the company and hence, for all the employees who do remain and who may be hired in the future, as the once failing company grows and prospers, or as a matter of a cosmic moral dilemma)?

To say he's spent his entire adult life creating jobs is laughable.

In the private sector, this is perfectly true. Did Bain have a 100% success rate? No. No one does.

Government, save for fighting wars and providing basic infrastructure, has a near 100% failure rate in virtually everything it sets its hand to and meddles in, and almost anything that goes on in the private sector, even at its lowest levels of success, look sterling compared to government.

[_Kevin Graham]

The letter, given the standing of PwC, is all that is reasonably required.

You're that naïve. eh? Of course, PwC is going to produce whatever letter Romney requires of them and they don't have to lie. But the devil is always in the details, and without the returns we'll never know what those details are. But what you don't get is that the letter doesn't refute Reid. Again,

According to the letter from PwC avowing the number, it is based on Romney's adjusted gross income. That means that, for instance, if Romney made investment profit of $20 million, but had losses of, say, $19.9 million, his adjusted gross income would only be $100,000. Paying 20.2 percent of $100,000 would cost Romney just over $20,000.

If Reid's comment is interpreted strictly -- that Romney paid literally $0 in taxes over 10 years -- then the PwC letter undermines that charge. But if Romney paid only a very small amount -- say, $20,000 on $20 million -- it would be hard to award Reid many pinocchios for calling that nothing.

Such a low-payment scenario is considered quite plausible by tax experts, who noted that investors can pick which investments to realize each year to maximize their tax benefit. In a year such as 2008, when the global markets tanked, an investor would likely have more than enough losses to offset gains. Indeed, Romney's 2010 tax returns show a carryover capital loss credit, meaning he had more losses than he could use the year before.

In other words, without seeing Romney's actual return -- or at least without knowing what Romney declared as his adjusted gross income -- it's impossible to know if the rate he paid bears any relation to Romney's economic reality.

And you still haven't come to grips with the fact that his Tax returns have no been released. It takes a real piece of Samsonite to immediately say this letter is just as good, simply because Romney says so.

[_krose]

You could not be more ignorant if ignorance was your life objective.

You mean it isn't? Shocking.

[_Droopy]

You're that naïve. eh? Of course, PwC is going to produce whatever letter Romney requires of them and they don't have to lie. But the devil is always in the details, and without the returns we'll never know what those details are.

We don't have to. The burden of proof is on the accusers to prove that the accusations are true, and that they are not slanderers, and given the circumstances, we have a situation in whcih the central accuser is not known, not known to even exist, and has not openly faced the one at whom the accusation has been hurled, but is hiding at Bain Capital, just as so many apostate LDS hide here behind comic screen names.

But what you don't get is that the letter doesn't refute Reid. Again,

Yes, it quite saliently does, especially given that Reid himself has produced not a shred of evidence, or a shred of reason to suspect, that Romney has ever done anything illegal regarding his payment of taxes and will not release his own tax returns.

And you still haven't come to grips with the fact that his Tax returns have no been released. It takes a real piece of Samsonite to immediately say this letter is just as good, simply because Romney says so.

Burden of proof is on the accuser, period. Reid has not a shred of evidence, period. There is nothing we know of in Romney's personal history or background that suggests any such proclivity, period. Reid's source, if he exists, has not risen to face the accused, and is hiding in the shadows behind Reid, period. It is not only on Romney's say so, but on the reputation of the largest and most prestigious accountancy firm in the world.

[_Kittens_and_Jesus]

I think there will be a lot of media silence on this one.

I read about it on CNN.com and heard it on NPR. You don't have a clue, do you?

[_Kevin Graham]

According to Politico:

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, says the campaign still hasn’t released enough information to make an accurate assessment of Romney’s wealth and tax history.

“We can’t really know what it means without having more information,” he said.
To arrive at the 20.2 percent figure the campaign said it added up the rate paid in each year and then took the average of those numbers.

That’s not the most precise way to determine the average amount of taxes the Romneys paid over 20 years, Williams said.

The most accurate way to calculate the figure, he said, is to add up the Romneys’ income and taxes paid between 1990 and 2009 and determine the average rate based on those figures. Depending on how the math works, that kind of calculation could have left the Romneys with a lower average rate over the course of the 20 years.

The Romney campaign still won’t release tax returns beyond 2010 and 2011. The summary of the 20-year data comes from a letter notarized by PricewaterhouseCoopers, which prepares the Romneys’ tax returns.

Those of us who have actually filed tax returns, see through the charade Romney is playing.