Washington Post to Harry Reid - Yeah, You Lied About Romney's Taxes

[red states rule]

Even the Washington Post called Harry Reid a liar over his comment about Mitt's taxes





The Facts
Romney has refused to release more than two years of tax returns, citing a precedent that is not very credible; he earned three Pinocchios (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/romneys-misleading-history-of-tax-returns-issued-by-presidential-contenders/2012/07/16/gJQAChunpW_blog.html) for that claim. Most presidential candidates in recent years have released more than two years of returns, so Romney may be paying a political price for failing to release more.

But Romney’s 2010 return (http://www.mittromney.com/learn/mitt/tax-return/2010/wmr-adr-return) and his estimated 2011 return (http://www.mittromney.com/learn/mitt/tax-return/2011/wmr-adr-return) do show that he paid substantial taxes in those years. In 2010, he earned nearly $22 million, including $3 million in taxable interest, nearly $5 million in dividends and more than $12 million in capital gains. He reduced his taxes by giving $3 million in charitable contributions (much of it in appreciated stock, which shielded him from paying additional capital gains.)

In other words, this tax return shows a portfolio that is not structured to yield zero taxes. We spoke to a number of tax experts, all of whom said that, given Romney’s current portfolio, it was highly improbable for Romney to have had 10 years with tax-free returns — though there could have been one or two years with little or no taxes.

(We will lay aside the interesting question of Romney’s individual retirement account, valued at as much as $100 million, which may have benefited from Bain Capital’s practice (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204062704577223682180407266.html?K EYWORDS=romney+bain) of allowing employees to co-invest retirement funds in takeover deals.)

Charitable contributions, first of all, could only get Romney so far. Taxpayers cannot eliminate tax liability only through charitable contributions.

Still, Romney at one point could have invested all of his money in tax-exempt bonds, though that is not his investment strategy now. (IRS figures show (http://www.forbes.com/sites/leonardburman/2012/07/17/gov-romney-just-release-the-tax-returns/) that 61 percent of high-income returns with no tax liability stemmed from tax-exempt interest.)

Romney also could have timed the sale of stocks or made other investment decisions that would have yielded losses that offset capital gains. Len Burman (http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/burman/), a professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, said IRS data show that 5.7 percent of the high-income returns had as a primary reason losses from partnerships and closely-held business. “We know that Governor Romney had a partnership, and it had losses in 2010,” he said. “It’s possible that those partnership losses were large enough to offset taxable income from compensation, rents, interest, dividends, and royalties.”

Romney also could have invested in tax shelters. Edward Kleinbard (http://lawweb.usc.edu/contact/contactInfo.cfm?detailID=68912), a law professor at the University of Southern California and former chief of staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation, noted that Romney chaired the audit committee of Marriott International when it engaged in a highly aggressive tax shelter (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-22/romney-as-auditing-chairman-saw-marriott-son-of-boss-tax-shelter-defy-irs.html) that was successfully challenged by the Internal Revenue Service.

But none of this appears to add up to 10 years of tax returns with no taxes paid. “It is theoretically possible, but it seems quite improbable in practice given the portfolio in 2010,” Kleinbard said. “It is improbable that a man of his wealth would have paid no taxes for 10 years.”

Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, said that Romney “probably reported income every year” but that he might have paid as low as a 2 percent tax rate in one year. “That’s close enough to zero for me,” he said.

Still, Reid claims that Romney did not pay taxes for 10 years. Moreover, he claims to base this on information from a Bain investor, without explaining how someone not intimately familiar with Romney’s tax situation would know details of his taxes.

We asked a Reid spokesman for more backup information and for the name of a tax expert who could back up Reid’s claim but did not receive a response.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/four-pinocchios-for-harry-reids-claim-about-mitt-romneys-taxes/2012/08/06/c31a1402-e007-11e1-8fc5-a7dcf1fc161d_blog.html?wprss=rss_fact-checker

[CSM]

Is anyone really surprised at this? It's typical lib propaganda; tell a lie often enough and it WILL become accepted as truth .... eventually.

[KarlMarx]

3823

Harry Reid - For me to poop on!

[taft2012]

First it was the Washington Post, now the NY Times and CNN are piling onto the criticisms about the Obama campaign.

What's going on? This is certainly not typical of the liberal media. Are they trying to preserve some shred of professional integrity, anticipating some kind of bombshell heading Obama's way? Or are they laying a groundwork of superficial objectivity prior to their big final push for Obama?

This NY Times piece is not typical at all. It's kind of a bet hedger, downplaying and rationalizing the liberal media's well know bias throughout the years, and tossing the Obama campaign under the bus to demonstrate their objectivity.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/fact-checking-is-not-enough/


Fact-Checking is Not Enough
By ROSS DOUTHAT
The speaker is a Midwestern Everyman: White, balding, deep in middle age, with hollows around his eyes. He sits at a kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee, talking about what happened after Bain Capital closed down his steel plant in 2001. He lost his job; his family lost its health insurance. His wife felt lousy but didn’t go to the doctor, to spare the family worry and expense. When she finally ended up in the hospital, the diagnosis was cancer. She had 22 days to live.

“I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone,” the man says at the end. “And furthermore I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”

That advertisement, paid for by the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA, was released on Tuesday morning. By midday the political press had subjected it to a fact-check and reported that not only was Romney no longer in charge of day-to-day decisions at Bain by the time the steel plant closed down, but the man’s wife – his name is Joe Soptic, hers was Ranae – actually died in 2006, nearly five years after the original layoff.

By the evening the debunking had gone further. CNN contacted Soptic himself for comment, and the former steelworker acknowledged that his wife had actually continued to have insurance of her own after he was laid off, and only lost her coverage more than a year later, when she left her own job because of an injury. What the ad had portrayed as cause-and-effect — Romney fired, Ranae Soptic died — was a tenuous-to-nonexistent connection.

It is possible, just possible, that the speed and scope of this debunking has been sufficient to thoroughly blunt the advertisement’s reach, or perhaps even knock it out of circulation completely. If so, the ad-makers working for Priorities USA will have achieved an extraordinarily rare feat: They will have created an attack ad so preposterous that it can be swatted down by media fact-checkers.

This almost never happens. Instead, even when they’re crossing lines and peddling inaccuracies, the makers of negative ads generally welcome criticism from the press, because criticism equals coverage, and even critical coverage expands the advertisement’s reach.

The same thing happened a generation later, when journalistic watchdogs parsed Republican ads on crime and welfare and affirmative action for racism and crypto-racist appeals. These efforts made TV spots like the 1988 Willie Horton ad and Jesse Helms’s 1990 “white-hands” ad infamous among liberals, but they didn’t prevent them from being devastatingly effective with the voting public.

In the internet era, the number of would-be watchdogs and fact-checking teams has proliferated, but the same problems remain. It isn’t just that even hostile media coverage tends to just widen an attack ad’s audience. It’s also that the interpretation of advertisements often has more in common with cultural criticism than it does with rigorous magazine fact-checking, which makes it hard for even the most down-the-middle reporter to define what counts as fair.

Sometimes this manifests itself in straightforward political bias. In a lengthy critique of “non-partisan” outlets like Politifact last winter, The Weekly Standard’s Mark Hemingway argued persuasively that their ostensibly neutral analysis often feels more “a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths” – mostly the ones that favor conservatives – “out of the conversation.”

But even when outright bias doesn’t intrude, the problem of interpretation remains. Reporters can check the date of Ranae Soptic’s death and the details of her coverage, but there’s no purely disinterested answer to the question of whether a businessman can be blamed for a layoff’s human toll, any more than there was a purely factual answer to the question of whether it was racist to show Willie Horton’s mug shot in 1988.

This means that with rare exceptions, viewers and voters, not reporters and pundits, will always get the final say on whether a particular advertisement crosses a line.

And the press needs to learn to trust them with it. Negative ads will always be feature of American politics, and voters have generally shown good judgment about what counts as a legitimate issue and what doesn’t.

The Willie Horton ad worked, for instance, because it was clearly linked to Dukakis’s own policy positions, and to the then-pressing issue of liberalism’s abject failure to deal with rising crime rates. The late-in-the-game ads attempting to tie Barack Obama to the former Weatherman Bill Ayers in 2008, on the other hand, fell flat because they weren’t tied to any of the major issues at stake in the campaign.

Even before its details were debunked, my instinct was that the anti-Romney cancer spot fell squarely into the latter category – not because jobs and health care don’t matter in 2012, but because there’s only so far over the top you can go before voters tune you out.

If I’m right, conservatives should save their outrage: Even if the media’s fact-checkers can’t quite close the book on this particular exercise in demagoguery, the wisdom of the American people will finish what they started.

[aboutime]

Sounds like someone at the Post, and New York Times finally grew a pair, or woke up to recognize what TRUTH really is.

Everyone knows Harry Lied. And it sounds like those papers...are finally beginning to get the picture in relation to their FALLING profit numbers, and fewer readers who PAY.
Both papers cannot survive only ONLINE. So here's hoping the AWAKENING about REID and OBAMA is finally here.

But we can't forget. Both of those papers were complicit with the LEAKS of National Security, still being investigated.

Could there be a new Pair of Nixon Like Reporters about to do an EXPOSE on OBAMA like the WATERGATE era?

Only OBAMA, and HOLDER know for sure. Isn't that right HARRY?

[Thunderknuckles]

I can only surmise that Reid is getting ready to retire and said what the hell? I'll just make up a whole bunch of crap, even if it makes me look like a douche bag, I've got nothing left to lose.

[Anton Chigurh]

First of all, these are blogs, not published reports in these papers. Don't get too excited.:laugh:

[aboutime]

First of all, these are blogs, not published reports in these papers. Don't get too excited.:laugh:


Anton. Yeah. Unfortunately. But it did feel just a little bit like a Chris Matthews TINGLE for a couple of seconds, just thinking what MIGHT BE.

[red states rule]

What we are seeing is what is known as random acts of journalism

Even Obama's most loyal base (members of the liberal media) are starting to grasp how more and more voters are feeling about the Chosen One