“Somehow, firing people with jobs became the Republican strategy for job creation. People who taught our children; policed our streets; picked up our garbage; put out our fires; built and maintained our parks, libraries, and roads for a living wage became the scapegoat for the impoverishment the private sector imposed on workers. Instead of organizing to win back their own living wages and lost benefits, people were convinced that taking away those of government workers would somehow make them better off. Divide and conquer politics. The politics of fear, hate, greed, envy and spite. The race to the bottom. Orchestrated by plutocrats, executed by conservatives, allowed by Democrats.” – John Atcheson
This means the “real streets” that Romney claims to live in must be paved with platinum, not gold:
“According to a calculation from Emmanuel Saez, the economist at the University of California at Berkley, who has become the top expert on top incomes, Mitt Romney’s income of $21.7 million puts him well above the 1%. In fact, his income puts him in about the 99.9975% income bracket. Put another way, Mitt is in the top 0.0025%.” — Wall St. Journal >>
Meanwhile, Mr. .0025% calls the president “detached from reality:”
ORLANDO — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney offered a tough review Wednesday of President Obama’s State of the Union speech, accusing him of being “detached” from the realities of a still lagging economy. Read full article >>
Maybe if Mr. Romney and his friends had invested all of the money they earned from this country IN this country, and paid more of their share of taxes to our domestic treasury, instead of paying more tax to foreign countries, our economy wouldn’t be lagging so badly? Or am I detached from reality too?
Here’s a fun game from Slate — enter YOUR annual income to see how long it would take Mitt to sit back and wait for that amount of money to appear in his many bank accounts around the world:
From Markos on Gingrich’s current populist and, seemingly, Occupy-Wall-Street-inspired campaign against Romney:
Translation: Republicans in the 99 percent don’t like the guy with the Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island tax shelters.
Newt’s outrage is driven by the polls.
If Newt wins the GOP nomination, will he be able to pull off this sudden interest in populist issues like income inequality and fairness better than a president and his party who have been discussing them all along?
[T]hese voters don’t care that Gingrich was a Washington insider, or has a record on family values that would give pause to one of the Borgia popes. It’s why they don’t really care that he contradicts himself, or says crazy things. They want crazy. They want to hear their anger and resentment made into a national platform. They are the victims of an evil conspiracy — no one plays the victim better than Gingrich when cornered — and they resent it.
They don’t really care what Gingrich says he will do, or whether it makes sense, or even whether they would approve of his policies or benefit from them. …only Newt has captured the key emotive element that drives the Republican core this year: resentment. The hard right core of the Republican Party is filled with resentment, and they have found just the man to let us all know about it.
But seriously, when Mitt Romney is nominated this summer, here’s an indication of the Reality Shitstorm that has been unleased and will continue through Election Day:
In October, Romney suggested that the solution to the foreclosure crisis was “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” While that process is bad for Florida homeowners, these investments show it may have been good for the Romneys.
Paul Sancya/AP
Maddow Blog: AP sends this picture of Mitt Romney yesterday at National Gypsum in Tampa, Florida, under a sign that reads “OBAMA ISN’T WORKING.”
That has been a theme of Mr. Romney’s campaign, but not usually on the day Mr. Romney releases his tax returns and shows he made many millions on his investments and puts nothing in Line 7 — the one for wages, the one for money you made while working.
No one, not one person on this earth, is amused by Mitt or his tax returns and income.
One week ago Mitt Romney referred to his income garnered from speaking fees as “not very much,” and “not very much” turned out to be $362,000 in 2010 as reported by USAToday
Upon today’s release of Mitt Romney’s tax return, we find out the USAToday report was wrong. “Not very much” was actually $529,000 in 2010.
Rich asshole Mitt Romney released his 2010 tax returns and an estimated return for 2011 [yesterday]. Together they total more than 500 pages, because purposefully structuring your wealth so as to maximally exploit the massive tax loopholes you have lobbied for over the decades is very complicated. The topline: Romney made $45 million in 2010 and 2011, almost exclusively from sitting there and watching his investments belch out money. He paid a tax rate of 13.9%. According the IRS, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid an average tax rate of 16% in 2008.
Bill Maher discusses why people hate Mitt Romney (the first video begins at his comments about Romney and the second video is the rest):
…
Maher:
You know, venture capitalists are not creators. They’re business men who find weak companies and prey on them. And Mitt can’t understand why anyone would ever question capitalism, no matter how feral it gets. “What? We found a wounded animal and we ate it!”
When asked about wealth distribution and income inequality, Mitt said, “It’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms.” Quiet rooms? Why? It’s a wealth gap not anal warts.
No wonder he doesn’t want to talk about it out loud — the most recent payroll data came in this week and the median annual income for an American is $26,353 a year. Or as Mitt calls it — a rounding error. At one of the debates Mitt said, “I won’t try and define who’s rich and who’s not rich, I want everybody to be rich.” Cue the morons in the audience clapping their hands like seals at a Seaworld getting a bucket of chum.
Well I can define who’s rich and who’s not: who’s rich is Mitt Romney and who’s not is someone making $26,000 a year…
A stock donation to the Mormon Church during the 1990s – when Romney was in charge at Bain Capital – shows how the donor might have booked significant tax savings.
In the transaction, the church received 93,668 shares of Wesley Jessen VisionCare Inc, a contact lens company.
The church sold the shares for $22.325 each, after an underwriting commission, according to a Wesley Jessen prospectus dated August 19, 1997. The shares had appreciated more than 50-fold since being acquired by Bain Capital Funds two years earlier at a cost of 43.4 cents a share, according to data in a Wesley Jessen prospectus filed with the SEC on February 13, 1997.
If Romney or another Bain partner or employee had cashed in the shares, they would have been taxed on the $21.89 per share gain, or $2.05 million.
Instead, the donor of the shares to the Mormon church avoided tax on the substantial capital gain and would have been able to count some or all of the $2.09 million of stock given to the church as a tax-deductible charitable contribution.
And how does Romney’s proposed ‘tax plan’ play into Romney’s income and taxes?
The revelation that Mitt Romney pays a tax rate of around 15 percent opens the door to another question: How much would his own taxes fall under the tax plan he would pass if elected president?
Here’s the answer, according to a new analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice that was provided to me this morning. Under his plan, Romney in 2013 would see his taxes cut by nearly half of what they would be if you use current law as a baseline.
Another way to put this: If Romney, whose wealth is estimated at as much as $250 million, is elected president and gets his way on tax policy, he would pay barely more than half as much in taxes than he would if Obama is reelected and gets his way — and the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire and an additional Medicare tax as part of the Affordable Care Act kicks in.
And let’s discuss it loudly, out in the open — despite where Mittens would prefer people talk — and especially since he’d like to double Bush’s tax cuts for the richest of the rich.
Too bad for Mitt Romney. Turns out income inequality — that thing he claims has no place in our political debate, or anywhere outside of “quiet rooms” — will be a central theme of President Obama’s re-election message. We know this because one of his top economic advisers essentially claimed as much in a public address at a top DC think tank on Thursday morning.
And the data he brought to the table suggests Democrats will have an easy time making their case
“[W]e can’t go back to the type of policies that exacerbated the rise in inequality and threatened economic mobility in the first place if we want an economy that builds the middle class,” said Alan Krueger, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. [...]
Thirty years ago, the U.S. underwent a shift — from an economy that grew in a way that lifted all segments of society, to an economy that gives heavy preference to the wealthy. That’s the broad story of the last three decades, but as Krueger pointed out, policy has a role to play. The trend abated temporarily in the 1990s, when the country returned to an era of fairly uniform income growth distribution. That all changed for most people, and their lost income has instead trickled up the ladder. Read more…
Does looking at that graph above inspire “envy” in you — or anger? I don’t think envy means what Romney thinks it means.
Other Republicans can speak about the need for free markets in a sluggish economy. But with Romney, we have a singular example of someone who made a quarter of a billion dollars by firing the white middle and working class in droves in ways that do not seem designed to promote growth or efficiency, but merely to enrich Bain.
Here’s the New York Post, for Pete’s sake, making the case last year against the shifty Wall Street games of Bain:
Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts…
* Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-’90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
* Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
* Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
Romney’s Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.
[...] Of all the jobs he liquidated, moreover, many are in the American heartland. And his response to the people in this documentary – white working class heartland Americans, the GOP base – is that they are merely envious of his achievements. They don’t come off that way in the ad. They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney’s goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself – the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute.
“a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at the white working class id.” This is incredibly important in a 2012 context — if Romney is going to win the presidency, he’s going to need to crush President Obama with white working-class voters who tend to support the GOP anyway. This short film, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, tells this constituency that Romney is not only indifferent to their struggles, but he and people like him caused their economic plight.
But when Romney’s nominated (the Republican Party will have it no other way), will the rightwing base voters decide they hate Obama more than they loved getting a paycheck and buying things (like food and medicine and mortgage payments)? I’m going to go with yes because Obama Derangement Syndrome is a chronic condition.
According to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, the average tax cuts received by the richest 1 percent of Americans under the Republican plans would be 270 times as large as the cut received by the middle class:
The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.
Perry wins the award with a tax cut for the richest 1 percent that is 270 times larger than his middle class tax cut, while Gingrich’s is 190 times larger. Santorum and Romney pull up the rear with tax cuts for the rich that are 100 times larger than the cuts for the middle class, while CTJ did not analyze Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul’s plans. (CTJ uses a current law baseline, rather than a current policy baseline, to calculate its cuts. Using a current policy baseline, millions of middle class families would see a tax increase under Romney’s plan.)
If you don’t think that’s “fair,” well… you’re probably just jealous. But can we discuss these kinds of “envy-producing” tax policies and income inequalities? Sure, in quiet rooms, using your inside voice, please:
MATT LAUER: Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as envy, though?
MITT ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.
Matt Taibbi provides a great counter argument to the Republican / Teaparty myth that the OWS protesters and Democrats calling attention to income disparity are jealous or hate success:
…And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that’s just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.
HOW THEY CHEAT:
FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as “standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself.”
CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system — and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government’s credit rating.
STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for people who’ve been foreclosed upon, because it’s they’re own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back… [...] Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they’ve scored bailouts.
UNGRADUATED TAXES. [...] Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes — in fact, it received a “tax credit” of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.
GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. [...] The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars — that’s a billion, with a b — you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.
Charles P. Pierce says this is what the Republican party and their self-hating base like to call a war between the “Makers” and the “Takers.” Except if you consider how much and how often the wealthy cheat, how the odds are stacked at least 275% in their favor, turns out it’s actually the wealthy who are the Takers.
Paul Sancya/AP
