2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forum"If you knew about this all along, why did you even run?"
Keep givin' 'em hell, Harry!
Posted with permission.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/10/13216372-reids-gop-source-has-direct-knowledge
Reid's GOP source has 'direct knowledge'
By Steve Benen
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Fri Aug 10, 2012 8:00 AM EDT
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) caused quite a stir when he said he'd heard from a Bain Capital investor that Mitt Romney hadn't paid income taxes for 10 years. Which investor? Reid didn't say. Why should anyone take the claim seriously? Reid couldn't say. He heard a rumor, and he passed it along.
Team Romney and the Republican establishment were apoplectic, but Reid didn't back down. On the contrary, the more the GOP complained, he more the Senate leader repeated the claim.
Yesterday, Reid's office even added some new details.
"This person is an investor in Bain Capital, a Republican also, and somebody who has been dealing with Romney's company for a long, long time and he has direct knowledge of this," said Reid aide Jose Parra, referring to Romney's tax returns.
Romney told ABC News that he would check his records to determine if he ever paid a lower rate than the 13.9 percent he paid in 2010. Despite requests from the network, however, Romney has yet to provide the information.
These are some pertinent details, to be sure, and would appear to narrow the universe of possible Reid sources. Indeed, speculation picked up overnight about the identity of the unnamed investor.
But there's a related angle to this that's also worth considering while we wait for tax returns that Romney refuses to disclose. The various fact-checkers who've slammed Reid have raised a relevant argument: putting aside the propriety of sharing unsubstantiated allegations, the claim is unreliable because it can't be true. Romney, the argument goes, couldn't have gone a full decade without paying income taxes.
And if Reid's underlying claim is just too implausible to believe, nothing else matters -- his source, at that point, is irrelevant.
The closer one looks, however, the more it appears this pushback is itself dubious, and it'd be a mistake to dismiss the possible veracity of Reid's claim out of hand.
Brian Beutler had a good report on this yesterday.
Tax experts TPM spoke with believe it's a plausible strategy -- but question whether he'd be able to whittle his effective tax rate down to zero.
To erase his federal tax liability this way Romney would've had to eschew other income sources, or figure out ways to zero out his effective tax rate on that income too.
"{I}t struck me as plausible," NYU tax expert Daniel Shaviro, who's been a leading analyst of Romney's public financial information, told TPM. "The reason people have been saying he must have paid something is that they've figured he must have (as in 2010) had some dividend and interest income plus other ordinary (rather than capital gains) stuff such as speaker fees. Zeroing all that out, if he had such income every year, would have required tax shelter losses that would very likely be deemed (by the IRS and many legal experts) as abusive."
This doesn't prove Reid is right, of course. It just means Reid could be right, in large part because of Romney's suspicious IRA with over $100 million in it.
One more thing: if the accusation is true -- at this point, it's still a big "if" -- Romney has a very serious problem. It would be inordinately difficult for an out-of-touch, car-elevating, Swiss-bank-account-owning, multi-multi-millionaire to tell mainstream voters, "While you were working hard and paying taxes, I was using accounting tricks to shield my vast fortune -- a fortune I made while laying off American workers."
Indeed, a whole lot of Republicans would start asking their presidential candidate, "If you knew about this all along, why did you even run?"
Berlum
(7,044 posts)Hello. The voters of the USA deserve a straight answer from you.
Answer the question, Willard (R).
enough
(13,259 posts)why didn't you tell us that before you ran?
I keep thinking of John Edwards and the damage he would have caused had he been nominated.
leftyohiolib
(5,917 posts)the little people. he has gotten his way his whole life and did it by people kissing his ass. he didnt have to answer to anything then and he feels he doesnt have to now. it's his turn as that horse's ass of a wife has said, so why wouldnt mr privilege run.
Cosmocat
(14,564 posts)how he could not have seen this coming is unfathomable.
He knew he was running for president this go around back when he ran the LAST TIME.
He had four years to file normal tax returns, pay his fricken fair share, and all he had to do was release those out front and he would be golden.
But, he just could not get past himself to bleed more blood from the stones.
I can't conceive not paying any taxes for 10 years, but it has to be REALLY fricken bad for him to not release them.
Just shows how craven he is that he had capacity to just pay taxes normally for a few years.
heaven05
(18,124 posts)he wears magic underwear, he's invisible(tax returns)to the commoner. He''s so special
Raster
(20,998 posts)And truly, why did Rmoney even run? Did he think this would never come out?
Dustlawyer
(10,495 posts)on it and get back to him would have been, "You are running for President and have been a CEO and you do not know? There has been all these questions surrounding your taxes for the last decade and you still claim not to know?". Give me a break, the media are corporations too, GE, Comcast, and they want Rmoney in office too! Journalism was co-opted a long time ago. I would be curious if the journalism schools are teaching corporate journalism, or are they teaching pure journalism and throwing these kids into reality, UN-prepared to be told what they can, and cannot ask, or can, and cannot, report on. The BP oil spill is a prime example of this. BP agrees to spend so many millions in advertising to help tourism on the Gulf Coast. The ads tell people to, "Come on down to Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana..." but they are aired on every break, on every channel, on radio, and in print all along the Gulf Coast. Why should they air commercials on the Gulf Coast, telling people to "come on down...", b/c these media outlets make more money from BP and will not write about what is going on down here. They do not tell any of the victim's stories or how bad the Gulf is screwed up! Where is Anderson Cooper's follow up?
vinny9698
(1,016 posts)But running for state office and running in the big leagues is another story.
surrealAmerican
(11,360 posts)... that Romney bragged to investors that he hadn't payed taxes, but was "exaggerating".
CoffeeCat
(24,411 posts)This is the question that keeps me wondering...WTF?
How in the hell does a Presidential candidate think that they can NOT release their tax returns? How narcissistic
and completely oblivious to reality do you have to be, to not foresee the huge crisis that would result from refusing
to provide your tax returns to voters?
Seriously. You have to be two things--outrageously arrogant and outrageously stupid.
That's Romney in spades.
The man may be an ace at vampire capitalism, but he is a total idiot when it comes to everyday life. I bet most of us could debate him and win. He's so self absorbed and accustomed to being a multi-millionaire elitist with his head in the clouds.
What a complete fool.
I get what he is---but I will never understand how he (and his surrounding team) believed that Romney could get away with this. It's completely mind boggling.
StrictlyRockers
(3,855 posts)This lightweight could never get elected president.
What in the hell was he thinking?
Tx4obama
(36,974 posts)UPDATE: 7:08 p.m. -- Parra now says he doesn't know whether Reid's source is Republican. In an email to HuffPost, he wrote:
"I do not know the party affiliation of the source, how long he invested with Bain, or his relationship to Romney beyond the fact that he was an investor with Bain Capital, as Senator Reid has previously stated."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/09/harry-reid-mitt-romney-tax-returns_n_1762255.html
More here: http://www.mediaite.com/online/harry-reids-office-claims-source-on-romneys-taxes-is-a-republican-quickly-takes-claim-back/