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Romney's New Video Features ... Obama Singing

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kirkspencer7/16/2012 10:44:02 am PDT

re: #8 iossarian

The Chronicles of Romney:

- Business experience turns out to consist of ripping people off and dodging responsibility
- Won’t release tax returns: opponents openly stating this is because there are recent years in which he “paid no taxes”
- Potential VP picks are all either mouth-breathers or elicit shrieks of rage from mouth-breathers
- Can’t sing worth a damn

It’s a real page-turner.

I’ve been thinking more about those tax returns and why he won’t release them. I’m wondering if he’s afraid of crowdsourcing.

There’s this assumption I’m seeing everywhere that his returns are going to be legal. After all they were accepted and he wasn’t audited, was he. Except, of course, that IRS audits have become less and less common for the wealthy. (two part punch on that. One, a requirement to audit across all brackets, and two the continuing cuts in number of experienced auditors.)

So what if some of his pre-2010 tax games were gray options, open to varying interpretations and challenges as to legality? Things like the guessed at method of getting his IRA so large: artificially pricing the stock low to purchase it for the account, then letting it revert to market. (If that’s what was done, by the way, it is borderline illegal - and might be completely depending on /how/ the artificial pricing was applied.)

What happens when a few thousand skilled and willing eyes start climbing through that backload of data?

Tax avoidance is legal, tax evasion is not. And I wonder if that’s part of what’s behind the unwillingness to release.