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From One Angry Democrat, a blog published anonymously by a Federal Employee.
Betting Against America:
One of the recurring theme's of this year's Democratic convention was the phrase: "You'll never get rich betting against America." As a rallying cry to show that Americans always pull through, it works. But taken literally, it is simply untrue. Depending on one's business, one can indeed get rich, very, very, rich, betting against America. We postulate that Mitt Romney has already done so, and that that fact, not tax shenanigans, is why he was not selected as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee three years ago.
Early in this campaign, both Democratic and Republican leaders asked Mitt Romney (and other candidates) to release their tax returns, to show the American people where their money came from, and to demonstrate their own compliance with the laws that all Americans must follow.
Unique among the Republican candidates - and in stark difference to the practice of his own father -Mitt Romnney refused. Eventually, under intense pressure, he released two partial returns, both filed after he left the company that made him wealthy (and continues to pay him dividends), Bain Capital. Since then, he has steadfastly refused to release more information.
Romney claims that two years should be enough. He says, in so many words, that two years should give us insight into where his money comes from.
If Romney were like most of us, that might be true. Most of us earned salaries all of our lives. We started working at a lower salary, and it rose during our lifetimes. The last two years of our tax returns probably do reflect our salaries at their highest points, and show where those salaries come from.
But Mitt Romney is a businessman. Business owners do not earn income at a steady rate, nor, often, do they earn their income from a single source. Romney's income has risen and fallen, and risen again. It varies from year to year, and it comes from dozens, if not hundreds, of sources. In order to understand his income, or that of any businessman like him, one does, indeed, have to review many years of tax returns.
What Mitt Romney's tax returns will should is that there is an inverse correlation between Romney's income and the well-being of the American economy. They will show that, because of the way he made his money, his income was highest when our economy was at its worst, and reduced as our economy got better. They will show, in other words, that Mitt Romney profited from America's misfortunes.
One of Romneys sources of income is Bain Capital, the company he co-founded and ran for many years. He left the leadership of Bain shortly after you elected George Bush as president, so he did not run it during the worst years of our economy, but he continues to earn a sizable portion of his income from Bain.
Where does that money come from?
Although Bain Capital today touts itself as being, essentially, a brokerage and consulting firm, when Mitt Romney started it in 1984, its primary business was butchering. It engaged in the practice of acquiring failing companies and butchering them into their component parts, selling off some of them, and keeping some for later.
Supposing you were a business owner, and your business was in trouble. Simply put, you owed more money than you were making, and you saw that your own end as a businessman was near. Mitt Romney and Bain Capital would come to you (or maybe you would go to them) and they would, if they wanted to, pay your debts for you (thereby making you owe Romney) for a certain period of time. If your business improved, you could pay Bain Capital interest. If it did not, Bain Capital would assume ownership of your company through what was known as a leveraged buyout, corporate takeover, or hostile takeover. Bain's website calls this a leveraged debt asset investment. If you have ever seen the movie "Pretty Woman," Mitt Romney was a corporate raider, just like the Edward Lewis character played by Richard Gere.
The reason they would do this (the reason Bain Capital would pay off a company's debts for them) was because they expected you to fail, and they wanted to own it. Not to run it as a company, but to butcher it. Like a cow, which is worth far less as a living creature than it is as meat that is sold by the the pound, a company - as an ongoing venture - is often worth less, in the short run, than its assets could bring if sold individually for a quick profit. A company owns one or more (often many more) buildings, machines, equipment, supplies. It may own - sometimes hundreds of - patents or rights to a product line or brand. And it may own other companies, or at least controlling stock in them, or have divisions that are more profitable than others.
So Bain would take over a failing company and butcher it, firing employees, selling off assets, and keeping for itself only those things (patents, rights, profitable sub-companies) that it thought worth keeping.
Some of those profitable sub-companies were successful, and they gave rise to Romney's claim of owning and running successful companies. Indeed, they grew and created jobs, just as he claims they did.
But most of Romney's income came from selling off the assets of the companies that failed.
Obviously, that type of business does best when the economy is at its worst. When the economy is good, people don't need "help" paying off their debts, and they don't need to deal with the kind of characters that will take your business away from you if you fall behind on your payments. But when the economy is bad, failing businesses lie at Bain Capital's feet like melons ripening in a field, and Bain (and others like them) have merely to stride through the field and pick the ones they want.
After he left Bain Capital, Romney no longer directed its operations. But he remains a major stakeholder, meaning that he owns a significant amount of stock and continues to earn money from Bain's operations. And without question, his tax returns will show that his income rose substantially as our economy failed, and that the worse our economy got, the more money Romney made.
That it bad. It is bad for a politician to be seen to profit from others' misfortunes. But his tax returns might also show something worse: details.
The tax returns of business owners are much more detailed than the tax returns of salaried persons. They contain all sorts of attachments and supplemental forms, all of which must, in theory, be supported by documentation. That documentation might list the companies Mitt Romney butchered, or at least, name some of them by name. Those names would include some sizable companies, and might even include the name of the company that fired - YOU!
If Romney releases his returns, you might find that he profited personally from the circumstances that led you to lose your job.
And then you might look at him differently. You might begin to understand the business he was in. You might begin to wonder if you really want him to lead your country.
Last but not least, his returns would show that, at the very least, he took advantage of every tax-law loophole available to him. Some claim that Romney's tax returns will show illegal tax dodging. I don't know if that is true. But legal or illegal, they will show that he "worked the system" in order to pay as little as he possibly could pay.
So Romney's returns hide four things:
That he paid less taxes than you or me.
That he profited from our nation's misfortunes.
That the list of people fired as a result of his business dealings might have included you.
And that, as long as he continues to benefit from his investments in Bain, he will continue getting rich betting against America.
No wonder he wants to keep them a secret!
