Mitt Romney Makes Old News, Again

One of the "startling revelations" in Double Down, the new political gossip book, is that the guy who told Senator Harry Reid that Mitt Romney had not paid taxes for 10 years was Jon Huntsman's father.

In August of last year Vanity Fair reported, "Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?"

Mitt Romney was allowed to contribute a maximum of $32,000 per year to his IRA and other forms of retirement accounts. So in 15 years, he contributed no more than $480,000. And yet that account is now worth $102,000,000 --- more than twice as much as Bernie Madoff's fictional returns.

But when it comes to other people's retirement accounts, it's been reported that Mitt Romney has made a career of stealing pension funds from workers.

The business model they used at Bain Capital is there for the reading. Find a company that was small enough that you could come in and buy that had millions in workers pension fund account. Take over that company with a borrowed money buy out . Use the pension fund assets to attract investors. Take the investors money, along with the pension funds, and move it overseas into a new company account with Bain Capital. Then charge the new company huge fees and sell the shares back to the company, effectively forcing them into bankruptcy. Then have company declare bankruptcy while the funds are overseas in the Bain Capital account (stashed away from US bankruptcy courts) forcing the US Pension Guarantee Fund to take over hundreds of million of pension funds due to bankruptcy. (Rolling Stone: Looting the Pension Funds)

But in all of the talk about this "news" of Romney not paying any taxes: regardless of where Harry Reid got his information, we have not read or heard anyone asking the question: "Is it true that Mitt Romney did not pay any taxes for ten years?" A classic example of media malfeasance.

Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute recently reported, "The amount of money stolen out of employees' paychecks every year is far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience store robberies in the country."

Yet some people (like Mitt Romney) accuse poor people on food stamps of "gaming the system." But who are the real crooks?

Thou doth protest too much, me thinks.