Democrats are homing in on Mitt Romney’s offshore holdings and presumed penchant for avoiding US taxes:
Guardian UK— The Obama aide continued: “Nobody knows why he has a corporation in Bermuda, why he failed to disclose that on seven different financial disclosures, why he transferred it to someone else’s purview the day before he became governor of Massachusetts.
“The one thing he could do to clear up whether he’s done anything illegal, whether he’s shielding his income from taxes in Bermuda or Switzerland is to do what every other presidential candidate’s done and that is to release a series of years of their own tax returns… The best way to figure out if Mitt Romney is complying with American tax law is to have him release more of the tax returns.”
The Obama campaign has not directly accused Romney of tax evasion but the issue of his offshore accounts plays into attacks saying that he made part of his vast fortune by shipping American jobs overseas when he was running Bain Capital and is seeking to protect tax breaks for millionaires.
I’ll give Romney the benefit of the doubt and assume he had people telling him this was all legal. But it looks terrible, the soundbites are awful — Mitt Romney bet against America and the American worker! — and refusing to release info on it makes it look even worse. It is practically a de facto admission of guilt as far as public perception.
I’m not the only one to wonder: what in the world has Romney been thinking all this time? He has been running for President since 2007, he and his advisors had to know this would be an issue way back when. To know one’s surprise it has become one, obviously, and watching LA Gov Bobby Jindal duck and weave and cover this morning on This Week when asked about it underscored just how big of a problem it is.
Simple answer – Mitt believes himself better than working people and is entitled to be POTUS no matter what – the primary on Kolob said he is right.
And we want the long forms, too.
It’s homing in, not honing in.
But I agree that this is good move for the Democrats.
Since Zeno started the grammar-despot game, I’ll also point out that it’s _Achilles heel_ like _Hapsburg jaw_ and _Chaplin moustache_. If you absolutely must use the possessive it should be _Achilles’ heel_.
The sheer arrogance is astounding, isn’t it? As you say, it just looks so obviously appalling on its face.
Like many of the 1%ers, Romney feels that laws and disclosures are for the little people, not for the likes of him.
Romney and Bain would buy a profitable company (using other peoples’ money), strip it of all assets, fire as many people as possible, saddle the corpse with the debt Bain incurred when buying the company, and then sell the corpse for a pittance. Yes, Romney made his money betting against American workers and American capitalism.
Mitt Romney believes corporations are people. That makes Mitt Romney…..
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A Serial Killer.
Er, brad, I think the correct term would be “vampire”.
Rather obvious. Mitt Romney thinks he needs more money!!! It’s a common enough thought, we all need it for one thing or another.
1. I doubt if it is illegal. I’m sure Mitt, the Harvard and Stanford educated businessman, and his advisors have figured out all the loopholes. I’m just guessing though because no one knows what he did exactly.
2. I’d certainly like to know though. I doubt if I have enough money and skills to pull it off myself but who knows, maybe. I’d settle for a fraction of his haul, instead of a $100 million IRA, say…a $1 million IRA.
3. The IRS should have audited him by now. Hell, they found a minor mistake on my return once and audited me for years after (and never found another one).
4. You are supposed to disclose on your return if you have foreign accounts or partnerships. IIRC, this is at the bottom of schedule B. I’ve always assumed if you check yes, they will audit you. Since I don’t, I never worry about it and just check no.
I wonder which box Romney checks?
Like pretty much every other question like this about Romney, the answer is “he didn’t think much about it because ‘everyone else’ was doing it”.
His social circle is limited to fellow rich idiots who are very good at taking piles of money and turning them into slightly larger piles of money by playing the system. He pretty much thinks that what he does is “normal” and that anyone who hears about it already knows that this kind of thing goes on and would find it to be quite normal.
Romney’s got the old one-two punch that is typical of those born into aristocratic families – he’s completely disconnected experience-wise from a “normal” life, so he has no personal experience to draw on to help him understand how “normal” people react to things. And he, like so many people, has little to no imagination and little to no empathy, so he can’t actually imagine how he’d feel if circumstances were different. Good politicians have one or the other of these (either a humble background that they can draw on to understand what people go through, or the ability to fake it). Romney has neither and its obvious.