"Robert Reich: Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis" by Robert Reich at alternet

[applegrove]

Robert Reich: Mitt Romney IS the Economic Crisis

by Robert Reich at alternet

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/1019052/robert_reich:_mitt_romney_is_the_economic_crisis/

"SNIP..............................................

Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon’s JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine’s MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs—a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, 
and the losers are most of the rest of us.


The thousands of job losses caused by Bain's "bad bets," while providing rich fodder for the Administration's campaign ads, are really just a microcosm of a self-perpetuating, labyrinthine tax system geared to rewarding the wealthiest with the privilege of betting their fortunes on money they've neither earned nor done anything to deserve, with little or no personal risk. Reich calls it "casino capitalism:"


The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people’s money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers.

* * *

The fortunes raked in by financial dealmakers depend on special goodies baked into the tax code such as “carried interest,” which allows Romney and other partners in private-equity firms (as well as in many venture-capital and hedge funds) to treat their incomes as capital gains taxed at a maximum of 
15 percent. This is how Romney managed to pay an average of 14 percent on more than $42 million of combined income in 2010 and 2011. But the carried-interest loophole makes no economic sense. Conservatives try to justify the tax code’s generous preference for capital gains as a reward to risk-takers—but Romney and other private-equity partners risk little, if any, of their personal wealth. They mostly bet with other investors’ money, including the pension savings of average working people


............................................SNIP"

[Angry Dragon]

1. Willard is just a fraud

[Tarheel_Dem]

2. This is DU. Substitute the name Obama for Romney, and you'll get a thousand recs.

Romney posts sink like a rock here!