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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
I guess I normally wouldn't even care that much.

But the fact that he's so adamant about not doing something presidential candidates normally do without controversy really has me wondering.

I don't normally go in for the whole "what's he hiding!?" hysteria, but I'll admit I'm highly curious, and it looks somewhat suspicious, especially given his track record and what we do know about his finances.

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Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by The Rabbit:
I'm not sure what you mean by "it looks somewhat suspicious". Do you mean "somewhat suspicious that he has done something clearly illegal" or "somewhat suspicious that he has done something politically embarrassing." If its the latter, I'm way past "somewhat suspicious".

Romney's taken a lot of flack, even from Republicans, for not releasing his returns. The longer he refuses to release them, the bigger the political liability it becomes. Unless he's an idiot, it's a safe bet that he and his campaign believe that releasing the tax returns will be a bigger embarrassment than keeping them secret.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
I guess I normally wouldn't even care that much.

But the fact that he's so adamant about not doing something presidential candidates normally do without controversy really has me wondering.

I don't normally go in for the whole "what's he hiding!?" hysteria, but I'll admit I'm highly curious, and it looks somewhat suspicious, especially given his track record and what we do know about his finances.

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I laughed when a columnist noted that it's so nice that Romney has decided that his first issue he will never flip flop on is the release of these tax returns.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Salon.com -- which is generally considered a liberal media outlet, thus no friend to Romney -- asked two tax experts whether they thought it was likely that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years. They concluded, "probably not."

The article quoted David Miller, a tax attorney with the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York, saying it’s "highly unlikely" that he paid nothing.

"It would be easier for someone like Steve Jobs to pay zero, as most of his wealth was in company stock, which isn’t taxed until sold and may never be sold," Miller told Salon. The Salon article continued, "But Romney’s arrangement with Bain is different. He would have earned management fees, and when Bain sold the underlying companies that it invested in, Romney would have been subject to tax on his share. 'It’s possible he paid very little in taxes, but I find it hard to believe that he paid none,' Miller said."

Salon also quoted Joshua Kamerman, a lawyer and CPA in New York, who said while it’s theoretically possible, it’s also "preposterous."

...

We asked Lawrence J. White, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University, for his view, and he concurred with Miller and Kamerman. "I agree that it's extremely unlikely that Mr. Romney paid no income taxes for 10 years," White said.

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Posts: 570 | Registered: Sep 2009  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Out of curiosity, Romney says he left Bain in 1999, so the last ten years of tax returns wouldn't have any Bain derived income, it'd all be from investment income. So those experts would seem to be a little off, no?

Besides, for a guy who mastered the use of shell companies and off shore accounts while at Bain, I'd be surprised if the taxes he paid were anything but very very low.

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Originally posted by capaxinfiniti:

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Out of curiosity, Romney says he left Bain in 1999, so the last ten years of tax returns wouldn't have any Bain derived income, it'd all be from investment income. So those experts would seem to be a little off, no?

Besides, for a guy who mastered the use of shell companies and off shore accounts while at Bain, I'd be surprised if the taxes he paid were anything but very very low.

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That's all speculation, and your'e welcome to point to any or all shell companies and tax havens Romney has utilized. Still, it's not approaching the level of Reid claiming - based on information from a source who's identity he won't divulge - that Romney paid no taxes. If he was arguing that Romney paid only capital gains, his speculation would at least be in the realm of possible truth.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Wayne Allyn Root released a column saying Romney should agree to release the past 10 years of tax returns if Obama agrees to unseal his college records. He believes the entire controversy would go away. I mean, we are supposed to be vetting these people right?

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if Obama agrees to unseal his college records..

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Originally posted by Geraine:
Wayne Allyn Root released a column saying Romney should agree to release the past 10 years of tax returns if Obama agrees to unseal his college records. He believes the entire controversy would go away. I mean, we are supposed to be vetting these people right?

http://www.rootforamerica.com/webroot/blog/

Warning, there are some....Well not birther comments but something along the lines of foreign exchange student, scholarships for foreigners, etc.

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:
For the situations to be equivalent Romney would have to release the tax returns, then the long form tax return, then the official primary document the IRS keeps and never copies. Then Obama would release his grades flowed by Romney now being obligated to release his banking statements, and on and on it goes.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Romney can't be transparent. If he was, we'd be able to see the wires and motherboard.

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Posts: 2302 | Registered: Aug 2008  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Samprimary:

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Originally posted by Geraine:
Wayne Allyn Root released a column saying Romney should agree to release the past 10 years of tax returns if Obama agrees to unseal his college records. He believes the entire controversy would go away. I mean, we are supposed to be vetting these people right?

http://www.rootforamerica.com/webroot/blog/

Warning, there are some....Well not birther comments but something along the lines of foreign exchange student, scholarships for foreigners, etc.

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Man, geraine. You love to link us to some really nutty sites, and this one has not deviated from your source tendencies.

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Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Rakeesh:
Well I guess that's one way not to respond to muliple explanations of how the two things aren't at all the same and that the request's purported claim of equality is deeply hypocritical.

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Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Geraine:
I do? I guess you have special powers to know that I love to do something. I don't remember constantly linking nutty sites in the past, but perhaps you have me confused with somebody else. It has happened before.

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Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Let me ask you something. Do you honestly believe that Romney didn't pay taxes for 10 years? Do you believe what Reid is telling you? If so, Why?

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Originally posted by Teshi:
Whoa, that photo of Wayne Allen Root on his website is a the creepiest image of someone I have ever seen, unless he's got a waxwork image of himself and that's what's pictured there.

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Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by BlackBlade:
For me I wouldn't mind one wit if Romney used loop holes to avoid paying taxes. Every American seeks to minimize their tax burden to the best of their abilities. He just happens to have more ability and information than most.

What I do mind, is his coming in with a fiscal reform platform, and all his talk has been about tax cuts, spending cuts, and simplifying the tax code, but not in a manner that would close the loopholes folks like him use, just so the less wealthy see their "entitlements" taken away.

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Lots of justified talk today about a new Tax Policy Center report on the distributional implications of the Romney tax plan, showing it to be very much a Dooh Nibor – that is, reverse Robin Hood – thing. Obama is talking it up; Romney, predictably, is dismissing the report as the work of a “liberal group”.

The question one might ask is, did TPC – which is actually painstakingly and painfully nonpartisan – make questionable assumptions to get its results, so that some other set of assumptions might portray Romneynomics in a more favorable light? And the answer is no: TPC actually bent over backwards to literally give Romney every possible benefit of the doubt.

Here’s what they did. They took Romney at his word that he plans to offset his cuts in income tax rates by broadening the base, that is, limiting exemptions and other loopholes. They also assumed, however, that Romney would not be willing to tax dividends and capital gains as ordinary income, since he has made it clear that he opposes any rise in taxes on investment income. As they point out, this leaves a relatively small pool of loopholes to close – big enough that the Romney tax cuts could, in principle, be paid for by base broadening, but not with a lot of room to spare.

So which loopholes are closed? TPC made the most Romney-friendly assumption they could – namely, that base broadening is concentrated on top incomes as much as possible. First you eliminate all deductions that benefit those with more than $1 million in income; then all that benefit those with between $500,000 and $1 million; and so on.

The key point is then that even if you do this, the tax cuts Romney gives high-income Americans are bigger than the loopholes he could conceivably close...

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This means that even on the most favorable assumption, the Romney plan would give the rich big tax cuts on net – which means that to be revenue-neutral, it must raise taxes on Americans making less than $200,000 a year.

So they’re actually giving Romney every possible benefit of the doubt – and still his plan is a redistribution from the middle class to the rich. In practice it would surely be much worse.

I’ll be curious to see how all this gets reported. The TPC results are ironclad; there is no valid Romney counterargument except to say that he doesn’t really mean all that stuff about actually making up for lost revenue. My guess is that the stories will nonetheless be he said/she said, but maybe I’ll be favorably surprised.

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1) The Tax Policy Center bent over backwards to make Romney’s promises add up. They assumed a Romney administration wouldn’t cut a dollar of tax preferences for anyone making less than $200,000 until they had cut every dollar of tax preferences for everyone making over $200,000. They left all preferences for savings and investment untouched, as Romney has promised. They even tested the plan under a model developed, in part, by Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s economic advisers, that promises “implausibly large growth effects” from tax cuts. The fact that they couldn’t make Romney’s numbers work even when they stacked all these scenarios on top of one another shows just how impossible Romney’s promises are.

2) The reason Romney’s plan doesn’t work is very simple. The size of the tax cut he’s proposing for the rich is larger than all of the tax expenditures that go to the rich put together. As such, it is mathematically impossible for him to keep his promise to make sure the top one percent keeps paying the same or more.

3) This is going to be a huge problem for the Romney campaign. The Romney team has tried to paper over the fact that its policy promises don’t add up by withholding the crucial details that independent analysts need to do the math. But now independent analysts are filling in those details for them (the Tax Policy Center’s look at Romney’s tax plan should be read in tandem with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities effort to flesh out his spending promises). And, ultimately, that’s worse, as actors with more credibility than the Romney campaign are showing what the Romney campaign was trying to hide.

4) Evidence the Romney campaign does not have a good counterargument, part one: If they thought releasing more details would make the plan look better rather than worse, they would have released them rather than letting outside organizations fill in the blanks. It’s essentially the same theory as refusing to release the tax returns. But now the Romney campaign is receiving pressure — including from conservatives — to release those details, which they know they can’t do. And unlike on the tax returns, no one can say that the details of Romney’s plans for governing the country are irrelevant to this campaign.

5) Evidence the Romney campaign does not have a good counterargument, part two: They tried to brush the Tax Policy Center’s analysis off as “just another biased study from a former Obama staffer.” That former Obama staffer is Adam Looney, one of the study’s three co-authors, who was a staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. But William Gale, one of Looney’s coauthors on this study, was a staff economist on George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. And the Tax Policy Center is directed by Donald Marron, who was actually a principal on George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. Calling the Tax Policy Center biased is ridiculous. Just ask…the Romney campaign, which referred to the TPC’s work as “objective, third-party analysis” during the primary. Oops.

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Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Rakeesh:

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Let me ask you something. Do you honestly believe that Romney didn't pay taxes for 10 years? Do you believe what Reid is telling you? If so, Why?

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No, I would be quite surprised to learn Romney was either that criminal or that stupid. Nothing I've had much to do with Reid's attacks-my irritation with the Romney campaign and my disgust at the blunt hypocrisy of the Republican base on this matter is entirely in Romney's refusal to release more records, and the insistence that the refusal is perfectly legitimate and unobjectionable, and that those who raise questions are somehow wrong to do so.

The party that claims to mistrust concentrated government power and government secrecy fields a candidate who goes to some political trouble to make sure we know less about some pretty critical parts of his life, personal and professional, before we make a decision to elect him, to know less about him than has been considered acceptable for candidates for, what, thirty years?

This after a years-long campaign of slander, racism, and xenophobia against Obama that is still powerfully believed in by a big chunk of the Republican base, and you offer up the 'compromise' that Obama should release records far less significant and far less recent than Romney's, and then pivot to 'well we're supposed to be vetting them both'. It's not the same thing at all.

You're a conservative, that's cool. Disagree on a lot, but that's kosher. But unless you throw some of the most important principles of conservatism overboard, your response to Romney's stubborn secrecy on this issue cannot be anything less critical than a serious wariness...unless, as with the GOP, your actual guiding light here is 'No More Obama'. That's why I said your bringing this up was embarrassing.

You're supposed to be the guy who, when politicians do this sort of thing, waves a big red flag and starts the sirens. The question is-why aren't you?

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Posts: 1937 | Registered: Nov 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Obama camp extreme dishonesty and viciousness

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Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Ron "Barack Nate Dhalani" Lambert:
Aren't any Obama supporters getting ashamed of how low the Obama promoters are being in their deliberate, outrageous falsehoods?

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Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000  |  IP: Logged | 

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don't we need someone in office who knows something about business and economics

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