Don't get mad at me for showing what Romney and Bain did in helping people avoid the tax man ........... OK? Was it all legal. I don't know. What it ethical?
Again, repeat after me: Tax avoidance is not the same as tax evasion.
When I do my personal income taxes I tally up my personal deductions, mostly on my schedule A and compare the result of itemizing my taxes vs. simply taking the standard deduction. Since I have kids and a mortgage, itemizing my deductions results in a lower tax burden. This is legal, but according to Rebecca Wilkins (quoted above) I guess that is CHEATING!
Yes, it's slander. It is not cheating on your taxes to find a legal means of reducing your taxes. This is what Bain does--gets the highest rate of return for their investors which included tax avoidance. Do you think a large private equity investment firm should only look at opportunities within the United States?
Yes, there are legal ways of avoiding taxes .... and there are illegal ways. Offshore companies in certain countries make it easy, especially for foreigners to use illegal methods.
Did Bain break the law? I don't know. You don't know. We do know they set up shell companies in the Cayman Islands as well as other countries and this may give the appearance of illegality.
Oh, and it isn't slander. She did not say "Bain participated in illegal activities." She said it would make it easy to participate in illegal activities. There is a difference here.
By the way, do you give Obama any credit for not having any offshore accounts?
A razor thin difference. Funny how when a person says "They sure make it easy to cheat" that really means the speaker is saying they are not cheating.
But when someone says, "there is no evidence that the investors had ties to paramilitaries in El Salvador" that really means "Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads."
Clients of Bain have offshore accounts in the Caymans
Romney does not. Don't think he ever did.
Romney has 1 Swiss bank account with $3 million in it. Tax records show U.S. federal income tax was paid in full on such account.
So let me try a little innuendo of my own. Debbie Wasserman Schultz...that's right, the DNC chairwoman that has screamed the loudest, had an offshore account in the Caymans. Now what? Whose eye is blackest?
All this is about avoiding Obama's record and exacerbating feelings of class warfare. That's all Obama has.
As his ads have shown , he will tell any lie or half truth and use any kind of sleazy innuendo to be re-elected, as long as it stays away from his record.
I guess I should get out more away from where I live.
In Kentucky, every political commercial from both parties tries to paint its opponent as associated with Obama.
There are some local Democrats that even accuse their Republican opponent as being allied with Obama.
Most of the national polls have Obama ahead in the electoral college, but saw no sign of that in Kentucky.
(Obama got 36% of the vote in 2008, and only got 51% of the vote in the 2012 Democrat primary against uncommitted)
Anyway, we have been in Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada for the last two weeks, and the political ads are just the opposite.
Everyone wants to be allied with Obama.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY
Romney Scrutinized over Bain’s Ties to El Salvador Death Squads
Republican candidate Mitt Romney continues to face scrutiny over his record at the private equity firm, Bain Capital. The latest controversy to surround Bain concerns how Romney helped found the company with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain’s start-up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s. The investors include the Salaverria family, whom the former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, has previously accused of directly funding the Salvadoran paramilitaries. In his memoir, former Bain executive Harry Strachan writes that Romney pushed aside his own misgivings about the investors to accept their backing. Strachan writes: "These Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital’s May investor meetings, and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital."
"At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some Salvadoran exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings, although no evidence indicates that those relatives invested in Bain or benefited from it.
"From another of the links:
"Family members of some of those early investors allegedly had ties to right-wing paramilitaries involved in death squads in the country's brutal civil war, although the paper found no evidence that the investors themselves had ties to paramilitaries."
DIRTY MONEY is OK if a nice family member can be found to transfer it?
Using the same logic, some people claim that God created the universe in seven calendar days but no evidence has been found to demonstrate it.