July 29, 2012
By: Juanita Jean Herownself
Category: Uncategorized
Come to find out, the oh-la-la business success that Mitt Romney touts in his run for the Presidency is based on his use of shell companies in two offshore tax havens.
Romney gained no personal tax benefit from the legal operations in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. But aides to the Republican presidential hopeful and former colleagues acknowledged that the tax-friendly jurisdictions helped attract billions of additional investment dollars to Romney’s former company, Bain Capital, and thus boosted profits for Romney and his partners.
So, let me see if I have this straight. Romney is going to grow our economy by putting it in Bermuda.
Hell, sounds like the best Republican plan I’ve heard so far.
It’s really quite simple, foreign investors put their money w/ Mitten’s money in a tax haven. They don’t pay US taxes on the gains and everybody splits the profits and they all go watch horses dance around.
1It’s the Olympic sport of multi-millionaires, and/or their wives. Another “business” nobody pays taxes on.
2I think he got a significant tax benefit from it if I read it correctly. If the money in those accounts grew due to them being there (for whatever reason, investing or interest) he got a tax benefit since he paid no taxes on that growth. They can weasel word it as much as they want but it amounts to the same thing. X money went in (100 x X) is how much it grew and (0 x X) is how much Rmoney paid in taxes on it. Simple math and 10 year old can do.
3“Romney gained no personal tax benefit from the legal operations in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.”
No but the campaigns coffers are loading up, in London and Israel fund raisers, from the foreign investors he partners with.
Go get ’em Sheldon!
4Notice the careful parsing of words: “… gained no personal tax benefit.”
He did, however, make hundreds of millions of dollars from people who did, in fact, gain a personal tax benefit by hiding all that income from the US government and people.
And really, we have no idea if Mittens did or didn’t gain any personal tax benefit, because of course, he refuses to release tax records.
5Unrelated Business Income (UBIT) is a problem for pension funds, IRAs and other tax deferral entities or accounts. Romney has an IRA that is worth between $25 million and $103 million. The only way to grow an IRA to that level is to put assets in it that grow and may generate UBIT. The common way to deal with this income is to have a foreign blocker corporation that allows one to shelter income and avoid UBIT.
If Romney releases his other tax returns we would be able to trace this income and confirm if Romney has been sheltering income in his IRA from UBIT and we could figure out how Romney was able to have a $100 million IRA.
6Don’t forget that a lot of that “foreign money” comes from drug and arms dealers, hedge fund traders, human traffickers, gambling interests, third-world dictators and other fine examples of enterprising ingenuity.
Money that enters these money laundries goes in dirty and emerges magically clean–and then they are called “tax havens,” as if their only purpose is to avoid those nasty government-imposed limits on one’s rightful property.
No, the sleazy places Willard Mitt goes for his financing are more than tax havens. They are where the ugliest kinds of exploitation are richly rewarded, emerging as “entities,” stripped of the lamentations of their suffering victims.
Then that money re-enters the economies of the world to finance housing bubbles and massive speculation, which then fail, causing governments around the world to bail them out with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Pretty good gig, eh, Mitt?
7Nothonathan,
Best explanation of Mittens and his magickly clean money I’ve seen – your editorial should be in the WaPo and NYT, with a headline……….excellent, thank you for truthiness.
8Pardon the cynical crabby a$$hole that I am, but seems to me these shell companies in tax haven countries are tailor made for laundering drug dollars, euros, and whathaveya by the boatload. Am I somehow wrong?
9The last time I checked, the Mormon “magic underwear” came down nearly to the knees and nearly to the elbows. Or do some special people get the good stuff that doesn’t show, or maybe if you’re special enough you don’t have to wear it al the time?
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