Vermont: The New Bermuda

[quinnox]

Candidate: Howard Dean
Category: Intellectual Honesty
Grade: F

Deanophiles love to spin their candidate's weaknesses into strengths--arrogance is a sign of conviction, tactlessness is straight-talk, and so forth. So I'm curious to see how they'll spin the latest Dean misstep: hypocrisy.

Turns out that while old Howard has been bashing the coziness of the Bush administration with corporate America, Vermont has quietly become the leading state for a dubious tax-break scheme known as "captive insurance"--under Dean's direction.

As a University of Connecticut law school professor told the Globe, "Dean apparently has no problems with tax havens as long as they are in the state of Vermont." And what an operation he's built: by introducing tax breaks and successfully scuttling a proposed Clinton-era regulation designed to stymie the scheme, Dean ensured Vermont is home to more captive insurers than the rest of the country combined. In 2001, he boasted that he wanted Vermont to "overtake Bermuda" as the number one destination for such operations.


http://www.tnr.com/primary/index.mhtml?pid=1075

The more Dean's record gets examined, after going beyond the campaign self-platitudes, the more it appears Dean is business as usual.

[Moderator]

1. dupe

please continue the discussion here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=5605&mesg_id=5605