“That’s All That’s Necessary”: Mitt Romney, “I’m Not Releasing Any More Tax Returns”
The most newsy item of Mitt Romney’s media blitz of network interview after network interview Friday night was his bold statement that he would not release any more tax returns than the two years he has already planned, despite growing pressure from President Barack Obama, Democrats and even some Republicans.
He said basically the same thing in every interview, but we’ll pick out two — from CBS with Jan Crawford and CNN with Jim Acosta. Here’s what he told CBS’ Crawford:
CRAWFORD: Governor you mentioned the tax returns. You’ve released one year of your tax returns. A lot of people are saying you should release more, you’ve got to go back to the early 1980s for a Republican — or a presidential candidate who has only released one year of tax returns. Are you going to be releasing more tax returns?
GOV. ROMNEY: Yes, I’ll be releasing this year’s tax returns as soon as they’re available. And uh – But I know, by the way, you can never satisfy the opposition research team of the Obama organization. They’ll always want more. And the answer is they’ll have this year’s and last year’s and that’s the information that, by the way, is not required by law. It’s the same type of information that was provided by Senator McCain and his campaign. It gives people a full review of my income and my expenses and that kind of matter. I’ll tell ya, it’s quite a process running for president. You obviously provide all the information you can about yourself and then you have all the opposition team say some pretty outrageous things which I think are very, very disappointing on their part.
And here’s what he told CNN’s Acosta:
First of all, we’ve complied with the law. The law requires us to put out a full financial disclosure. That I’ve done. And then, in addition to that, I’ve already put out one year of tax returns. We’ll put out the next year of tax returns as soon as the accountants have that ready. And that’s what we’re going to put out.
I know there will always be calls for more. People always want to get more. And, you know, we’re putting out what is required plus more that is not required. And those are the two years that people are going to have. And that’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances. And, look, if people believe this should be a campaign about attacking one another on a personal basis and go back to the kinds of attacks that were suggested in some campaigns in the past, I don’t want to go there.
By: Brett LoGiurato, Business Insider, July 13, 2012
“Another Lurch Downward”: Romney Thinks He’s Above The Level Of Accountability Required Of A Presidential Candidate
The gist of his big media interviews today is explained thus:
Mitt Romney on Friday night demanded an apology from President Obama for making what he called “reckless” and “absurd” allegations about his record while repeating his insistence that he left Bain Capital in 1999 to run the Olympics.
He then attacked the president personally:
“What kind of a president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party?” Mr. Romney asked during a brief interview with CBS News. Earlier, on CNN, Mr. Romney called the accusation of criminal behavior — which came on Thursday from Mr. Obama’s deputy campaign manager — “disgusting” and “demeaning” and said it was destructive to the political process.
“It’s something that I think the president should take responsibility for and stop it,” Mr. Romney said.
This is another lurch downward for Romney in this cycle, I’d say. For a simple reason. We have documentary proof that Romney told the SEC he was CEO of Bain through 2002, and that he drew a salary of more than $100,000 for doing that job. So was he telling the truth on television today when he insisted that “I left any responsibility whatsoever, any effort, any involvement whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999” – or when the company he solely owned filed with the SEC, and when Bain itself called him the CEO in July 1999, and when he testified under oath in 2002 that he was involved in many business and board meetings of Bain companies in the period in question?
To put it more succinctly: how does this statement
[T]here were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth… [I] remained on the board of the Staples Corporation and Marriott International, the LifeLike Corporation [all Bain companies]
and this excerpt from a press release from Bain in July 1999:
Bain Capital CEO W. Mitt Romney, currently on a part-time leave of absence to head the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee for the 2002 Games said …
jibe with this one today:
“I left any responsibility whatsoever, any effort, any involvement whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999 … I went on to run the Olympics for three years I was there full time after that I came back and ran in Massachusetts for governor. I had no role with regards to Bain Capital after February 1999.
and this recent statement from Bain itself, declaring Romney had:
“absolutely no involvement with the management or investment activities of the firm or with any of its portfolio companies.”
My italics. He had “no role with regards to” Bain Capital after February 1999 (a very broad statement) – except for being the CEO, and repeatedly returning to Massachusetts for board meetings of Bain-owned companies, which he “attended by telephone if I could not return”.
A false SEC filing is a serious offense; to say so is not disgusting. So is potential perjury in 2002 when Romney detailed his continued involvement in Bain-owned enterprises in the period he retained the CEO title and now says he had nothing whatsoever to do with Bain. The SEC filing rules apply to everyone – except, it seems, to Romney, and his well-paid legal and accounting team. They may have so internalized this immunity from any accountability that Romney may indeed genuinely feel disgusted by being called to follow the normal rules, or called out on logical inconsistencies.
I’m getting the feeling that Romney thinks he is above the level of accountability required in a presidential candidate or even in an average ethical businessman. He seems genuinely offended to be directly challenged with facts – which he still won’t address or rebut in detail. So he simply huffs and puffs and uses words like “disgusting” for a perfectly valid charge in the big boy world of presidential politics.
This does not seem to me to be like a candidate ready for prime time.
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, July 13, 2012
“Wrong Kind Of People”: The GOP’s Crime Against Voters
Spare us any more hooey about “preventing fraud” and “protecting the integrity of the ballot box.” The Republican-led crusade for voter ID laws has been revealed as a cynical ploy to disenfranchise as many likely Democratic voters as possible, with poor people and minorities the main targets.
Recent developments in Pennsylvania — one of more than a dozen states where voting rights are under siege — should be enough to erase any lingering doubt: The GOP is trying to pull off an unconscionable crime.
Late last month, the majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, was addressing a meeting of the Republican State Committee. He must have felt at ease among friends because he spoke a bit too frankly.
Ticking off a list of recent accomplishments by the GOP-controlled Legislature, he mentioned the new law forcing voters to show a photo ID at the polls. Said Turzai, with more than a hint of triumph: “Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania — done.”
That’s not even slightly ambiguous. The Democratic presidential candidate has won Pennsylvania in every election since 1992. But now the top Republican in the Pennsylvania House is boasting that, because of the new voter ID law, Mitt Romney will defy history and capture the state’s 20 electoral votes in November.
Why on earth would Turzai imagine such a result? After all, the law applies to all voters, regardless of party affiliation. It is ostensibly meant only to safeguard the electoral process and eliminate fraud. Why would a neutral law have such partisan impact?
Thanks to figures released last week by state officials, we know the answer. It turns out that 758,939 registered Pennsylvania voters do not have the most easily obtained and widely used photo ID, a state driver’s license. That’s an incredible 9.2 percent of the registered electorate.
Most of the voters without driver’s licenses live in urban areas — which just happen to be places where poor people and minorities tend to live. More than 185,000 of these voters without licenses, about one-fourth of the total, live in Philadelphia — which just happens to be a Democratic stronghold where African Americans are a plurality.
Could suppressing the urban minority vote really give Pennsylvania to Romney? It probably wouldn’t have made a difference in 2008, when Obama trounced John McCain handily. But the statewide contest is often much closer — and turnout in Philadelphia typically is key to a Democratic candidate’s prospects. In 2004, for example, John Kerry’s margin over George W. Bush in the state was a mere 144,248.
Perhaps these numbers are so intoxicating that Turzai forgot the cover story about how voter ID is supposed to protect the franchise rather than selectively restrict it. His spokesman later explained that Turzai meant “the Republican presidential candidate will be on a more even keel thanks to voter ID” — in other words, there will be a level playing field once the new law eliminates all that pesky voter fraud.
That might be reasonable, except for one fact: There’s no fraud to eliminate.
Prodded by GOP political activists, the Justice Department under Bush conducted an extensive, nationwide, five-year probe of voter fraud — and ended up convicting a grand total of 86 individuals, according to a 2007 New York Times report. Most of the cases involved felons or immigrants who may not have known they were ineligible to vote.
Not one case involved the only kind of fraud that voter ID could theoretically prevent: impersonation of a registered voter by someone else. Pennsylvania and other voter ID states have, in essence, passed laws that will be highly effective in eradicating unicorns.
The Pennsylvania law and others like it are under attack in the courts; this week, a federal three-judge panel in Washington is hearing arguments on Texas’s year-old law, with a ruling expected next month. Meanwhile, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a conservative Republican, broke with orthodoxy last week and vetoed bills that would have toughened an existing voter ID statute. Maybe the tide is turning. If it doesn’t, these laws will potentially disenfranchise or discourage millions of qualified voters.
In a previous column, I wrote that voter ID was a solution in search of a problem. I was wrong: The problem seems to be that too many of the wrong kind of voters — low-income, urban, African American, Hispanic — are showing up at the polls. Republican candidates have been vowing to “take back” the country. Now we know how.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 9, 2012
“Ich Bin Ein Small Business”: Small Is So Beautiful To Mitt Romney
Our subject for today is the care and feeding of small businesses.
“I love you guys,” Mitt Romney told a teleconference hosted by the National Federation of Independent Business. “I love the fact that you’re working hard to follow your dreams and to build businesses. I — I love you guys. I love the fact that you’re — that you’re working hard to — to follow your dreams and to — and to build businesses.”
To summarize: We love you, guys.
And they’re everywhere! The Small Business Administration defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 workers, and that’s 99.7 percent of everything out there. “There are 5.7 million firms with employees in this country, and about 5.7 million have fewer than 500 employees — rounding slightly,” said Robert McIntyre, the director of Citizens for Tax Justice.
It’s sort of metaphysical, when you get right down to it. I am you as you are me and we are one and we are all small businesses. Ich bin ein small business. No wonder politicians want to get on their good side.
All of this takes us to President Obama’s call for Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for families with incomes below $250,000 a year. Most people, the president said, believe it is wrong to “raise taxes on middle-class families.” It was certainly a triumphant moment for the administration’s economic policies. In 2008, who among us could have hoped that four years in the future, middle-class Americans would be making $250,000 a year?
But Romney called the idea “a massive tax increase on job creators and on small business.” He also denounced it as “another kick in the gut to the middle class in America,” thus signaling his determination to broaden the American middle even further, as well as to call everything the president does a “kick in the gut” for the rest of this campaign season.
How do we feel about this argument, people? We are not talking about business taxes, in the normal sense of the word. If we were, it would quickly become so incredibly confusing that you would be begging me to go back to the matter of the dog Romney once tied to the roof of his car.
The typical American business owner does not pay corporate taxes. He or she subtracts expenses from revenues and declares the bottom line as income. There are many, many advantages to this approach. You can avoid corporate tax rates, and it’s a lot easier to deduct things. If you’re a baker of gourmet cupcakes, you can subtract the entire cost of your new $50,000 ovens from your income, right up front, as well as lunch with your best friend who is also an occasional cupcake purchaser.
“There are rules, of course, but both the rules and the implementation of the rules are fuzzy,” said William Gale, the co-director of the Tax Policy Center.
And everybody can get into the game! Including partners in hedge funds and law firms and investment banks. “Here’s the beauty — each of the hedge fund principals themselves is a small business,” said Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council. Sperling is a small business himself because he gets occasional royalty payments for co-writing a few episodes of “The West Wing.”
This flight to small is so popular that the Congressional Research Service concluded that if taxes on high incomes went up, it would actually create more small businesses because more rich people would want to “seek self-employment because the opportunities for tax evasion and avoidance are greater.”
Small business growth. It’s what makes America great.
When the Republicans claimed that capping the Bush tax cuts at $250,000 would hurt small businesses, the Obama administration quickly retorted that only about 3 percent of the small business owners have incomes above $250,000.
Yeah, said the Republicans, but that little slice still represents more than 900,000 people, and half of all the nation’s business income.
Yeah, said the Democrats, but that’s because of the hedge fund managers and law partners and movie stars with rental property.
Yeah, said the Republicans, but the high-end sort-of-small businesses will still cut back on jobs or investment if their taxes go up. Taxes rise, bad things happen. It’s an article of faith. The Hartford Financial Group said it did a survey that showed just that, although as Robb Mandelbaum pointed out in The Times, only 2 percent of the small businesses surveyed actually cited taxes as their prime concern.
We do know these things: Republicans do not like income taxes, even for very wealthy people. Possibly particularly for very wealthy people. Barack Obama, who also has royalty income, is a small business. Possibly the only small business the Republicans do not love.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 11, 2012
“Radical And Anti-Thought”: Remember The Party Of Personal Responsibility?
The House Republicans are going to vote today to repeal the ACA, and the message they’re going to be sending to people who have cancer or diabetes or any number of other diseases but don’t have insurance is simple, and forgive my bluntness in this non-family newspaper where such language, I’m given to understand, is occasionally permisslbe. The message is: Fuck off.
Matt Miller put the matter powerfully in his Post column yesterday:
Here’s what you should do, Mr. President. In the debates this fall, pull out a small laminated card you’ve had made as a prop for this purpose. Then remind Mitt Romney that the ranks of the uninsured today are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming.
Read that list slowly, Mr. President. Then ask your opponent: Would America turn its back on the citizens of these 25 states if everyone there lacked basic health coverage? That’s what we’ve been doing for decades. You knew it was right to act when you were governor of Massachusetts, Mitt. How can you pretend we don’t need to solve this for the nation? And how can you object with a straight face when your own pioneering plan was my model?
Can I get an amen to that? And then he might add something like, “As you said many times yourself, Governor, the point of requiring people to buy insurance is to instill a sense of personal responsibility. No free riders. No trips to the emergency room that the rest of us pay for. Why did you believe in personal responsibility then but are against it now?”
I swear, as I noted yesterday, this is starting to smell to me like an issue the Democrats can win votes on this fall. Believe me, if I thought the opposite, I’d say so. I did think the opposite just a few weeks ago. What changed?
John Roberts, basically. Politically, his signing on to the decision lends a bulletproofness to the Democratic position, changes the whole mentality of the debate. If it had been Kennedy with the liberals, meh. But Roberts’ stamp of approval on the plan allows the Democrats some room to play offense. And that offense is built around one simple claim: Republicans would deny coverage to sick people and let them die.
Sprinkling a little personal responsibility sugar on top can’t hurt. Use their blind extremism against them. Here is a position that was once theirs, that they came up with and that they’ve now abandoned, just because Obama took it up. It’s a great marker of how radical and anti-thought they’ve become, that they’re now willing to let people suffer and die in the hopes that they can defeat a political adversary.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 11, 2012
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