Where the money lives: my article in Vanity Fair
Posted by:
Nick Shaxson
in:
Thoughts
On Mitt Romney. With Alec Baldwin on the cover. And currently it seems to be getting a lot of attention: see the picture.
Time to don the flak jacket and tin helmet.
I would like to thank a lot of people for their help with this article, including a couple who insist on remaining deep in the background. But particular thanks go to the indefatigable Jaime Lalinde of Vanity Fair.
Excellent piece. Well done.
Thanks Gary!
Great article; there’s one question here that I think someone ought to delve into. Two of Romney’s major financial campaign promises are (1) an immediate repatriation tax holiday and (2) eventually changing to a territorial income tax. This leads to two questions:
1) Given that much of Romney’s wealthy is tied up in dummy corporations in tax havens and has not yet been realized as income via repatriation, how much would he personally stand to profit from a repatriation holiday?
2) How would effective income tax rates for financial managers with assets in tax havens in low/no-tax countries change if the corporate income tax on repatriated income was zero?
3) Presumably, Romney’s 2004/2005 filings would be useful in answering this question if he would release them; to what extent did he take advantage of the temporary “stimulus” tax holiday then?
Since reading your book, I find it’s impossible to consume the news in the same way. We’re seeing Sarkozy’s wife’s pad being raided, Diamond explaining how banks worldwide fixed interest rates, and a financial raider, Mitt Romney, running for the presidency.
Your book makes an excellent counterpart to John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Hopefully you caught this excellent essay on Romney at truthout
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10109-mitt-romney-and-the-new-gilded-age
Astonishing piece, extremely well done.
I did wonder how the Tea Party folks were going to justify their support for Romney after reading your article.
Then I remembered “reading” was the operative activity associated with your work.
I love your stuff – I’m a bit of a financial reporting geek. I started to comment on Facebook that Romney has released fewer tax years than … and then could site an instance where tax returns for a number of years are a requirement for a job. Next I noticed that most of our Congress people do not disclose their taxes either. All cite their completion of the Financial Disclosure Form as a source for desired information.
Can you do an article that compares tax forms to financial disclosure forms for some taxes that have been released. Discuss penalities between the forms and then suggest that the financial disclosure form might need to be amended to add taxes due/paid with penalities for discrepancies between the two forms.