Bishop Willard (R): a tax dodger and a draft dodger

Romney Paid Zero Taxes From 1996 To 2009

Source: Daily Kos

Using a tax shelter called a CRUT (charitable remainder unitrust) that was held by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Mitt Romney was able to pay zero taxes (legally) every single year from 1996 to 2009. Why did he stop in 2009? Because he would make public his 2010 tax return, that is why.

This tax loophole was killed by Congress in 1997. However those including Romney that were already using it were allowed to continue it. The way it works, is that Romney makes a "charitable" contribution to the Church of Latter Day Saints and it goes into a trust. Since the trust is held by the church, the money is tax deferred. Any capital gains, are non taxed because of the charities status. Like an annuity, the donor gets a charitable tax deduction and an stream of cash payments. When Romney dies, the church accepts full ownership..

Bloomsberg's attorneys estimate as the Romneys have received these payments, the money that will potentially be left for charity has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011.....

Romney has refused to answer any thing on this topic. His campaign puts out that it was all legal....

Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/04/1155381/-Breaking-Romney-Paid-Zero-Taxes-From-1996-To-2009

1 Not-So-Simple Pretty Funny Question for the 73% of White Evangelicals

By Frank Schaeffer

A question that deserves an answer before election day.

 

According to polls 73 percent of WHITE evangelicals will be voting for Mitt Romney.

If the polls are correct here’s the question I'd like to ask evangelicals using their own style of language/concerns/theological thinking as applied to their choice:

What’s the explanation for the fact that white American Evangelicals made the allegedly philandering lying ignorant braggart lapsed Roman Catholic Dinesh D'Souza their anti-Obama hero, embrace a pro-choice Mormon bishop who promoted abortion and Planned Parenthood in MA, are working to elect a job-destroying tax-avoiding lying flip-flopping-tell-anyone-anything-they-want-to-hear Swiss bank account collecting draft dodger running with a disciple of the God-hating, Jesus-mocking hater-of-the-poor Ayn Rand, for their presidential candidate and look the other way as a crazed ultra-Zionist many Israeli Jews fear billionaire casino owner who is being investigated for allegedly making billions off the dirtiest Chinese gambling Communist Party-controlled outfit in the world funds the enterprise, at the very same time as Franklin Graham sold his ailing father Billy’s soul and denied core evangelical theology by taking Mormonism off the Billy Graham organization’s list of cults in order to help the Mormon pagan-ritual-performing, Trinity-denying, casino-money-grubbing billionaire-coddling, earth-destroying global-warming denying Mormon bishop win respectability for his dead-Jews-baptizing-polygamy-rooted-reality-denying-interplanetary Masonic lodge-embracing faith in an election against an exemplary modest faithful husband good father compassionate smart black evangelical Christian President whose major accomplishments include saving the economy, ending a war, killing our greatest enemy, giving health care to children and the poor and the "least of these" and who has tried to reduce the number of abortions by helping women escape poverty in a reenactment of the lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Go figure.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.

Romney ‘rented’ Mormon church’s exemption to defer taxes for 15 years

By Jesse Drucker - Oct 29, 2012 12:01 AM ET

In 1997, Congress cracked down on a popular tax shelter that allowed rich people to take advantage of the exempt status of charities without actually giving away much money.

Individuals who had already set up these vehicles were allowed to keep them. That included Mitt Romney, then the chief executive officer of Bain Capital, who had just established such an arrangement in June 1996.

The charitable remainder unitrust, as it is known, is one of several strategies Romney has adopted over his career to reduce his tax bill. While Romney’s tax avoidance is legal and common among high-net-worth individuals, it has become an issue in the campaign. President Barack Obama attacked him in their second debate for paying “lower tax rates than somebody who makes a lot less.”

In this instance, Romney used the tax-exempt status of a charity -- the Mormon Church, according to a 2007 filing -- to defer taxes for more than 15 years. At the same time he is benefitting, the trust will probably leave the church with less than what current law requires, according to tax returns obtained by Bloomberg this month through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In general, charities don’t owe capital gains taxes when they sell assets for a profit. Trusts like Romney’s permit funders to benefit from that tax-free treatment, said Jonathan Blattmachr, a trusts and estates lawyer who set up hundreds of such vehicles in the 1990s.

Near Zero

“The main benefit from a charitable remainder trust is the renting from your favorite charity of its exemption from taxation,” Blattmachr said. Despite the name, giving a gift or getting a charitable deduction “is just a throwaway,” he said. “I used to structure them so the value dedicated to charity was as close to zero as possible without being zero.”

When individuals fund a charitable remainder unitrust, or “CRUT,” they defer capital gains taxes on any profit from the sale of the assets, and receive a small upfront charitable deduction and a stream of yearly cash payments. Like an individual retirement account, the trust allows money to grow tax deferred, while like an annuity it also pays Romney a steady income. After the funder’s death, the trust’s remaining assets go to a designated charity.

Romney’s CRUT, which is only a small part of the $250 million that Romney’s campaign cites as his net worth, has been paying him 8 percent of its assets each year. As the Romneys have received these payments, the money that will potentially be left for charity has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011.

Tax Returns

The Romney campaign declined to answer written questions about the trust.

“The trust has operated in accordance with the law,” Michele Davis, a campaign spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

Paul Comstock, a financial adviser to LDS Philanthropies, an arm of the Mormon Church, said that while he wasn’t familiar with the trust, Romney and his trustee might arrange to compensate the church for the dwindling amount with other gifts.

“It may be that they’ve made provisions for the charity someplace else that will make up for what this isn’t going to give them,” Comstock said.

Bloomberg News obtained the trust’s tax returns from 2007 to 2011 from the Internal Revenue Service. Romney hasn’t disclosed the trust’s tax returns and is under no legal obligation to do so. He did make some disclosures about the trust’s investments in Massachusetts filings from 2002 to 2007 and as a presidential candidate in the current campaign.

After Death

Funds held by Romney’s trust are scheduled to be distributed after the death of Romney and his wife to “a charitable organization to be designated by Romney,” according to the 2007 filing, disclosing assets he held while governor of Massachusetts. “In the absence of such a designation the funds will go to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.”

Davis declined to comment on whether Romney has designated another charity since then.

Romney has been an active member of the church, which expects members to donate 10 percent of their income. Over the years, he has donated millions of dollars of stock in Bain-owned companies to the church, securities filings show.

The church recommends such trusts on its website as one of many options for donors.

“Probably one of the advantages of a charitable remainder trust is that it helps with capital gains tax,” said Carl McLelland, an attorney in the planned giving office for LDS Philanthropies.

Capital Gains

CRUTs were more common in the 1990s when capital gains rates were higher. In 1996, when Romney set up his trust in Massachusetts, the federal rate was 28 percent, compared with 15 percent today. At the time, a Massachusetts state resident who sold shares for a gain of $1 million could have faced a combined state and federal capital gains tax of as much as 40 percent, reducing his take to $600,000.

By contrast, if he contributed the stock to a CRUT, and it sold the shares, it typically wouldn’t owe any tax since it is a charitable trust. The CRUT could reinvest the $1 million and earn a return on the full amount.

“The power of this is the tax deferral,” said Jay A. Friedman, a partner at accounting firm Perelson Weiner LLP in New York. “The money is all growing tax free and he only pays tax on what is distributed to him.”

Concerned that CRUTS weren’t sufficiently philanthropic, Congress mandated in July 1997 that the present value of what was projected to be left for charity must equal at least 10 percent of the initial contribution. Existing CRUTS weren’t affected by the new law.

Dwindling Principal

Romney’s trust was projected to leave to charity an amount with a present value of a little less than 8 percent of the initial contribution, according to an analysis by Friedman. Thus, the specifics of Romney’s trust wouldn’t have passed legal muster if it had been set up 13 months later, he said.

Because the trust’s investments have been earning a return far below its annual payouts to the Romneys, its principal has dwindled rapidly.

In 2001, five years after it was established, the trust had a value of between $750,000 and $1.25 million. Since then, it has pursued a conservative investment strategy -- regardless of the ups and downs of the stock market -- buying a mix of money- market funds, federally-backed bonds and federal bond funds. Since 2007, it has moved its assets entirely into cash. By 2011, its investments earned a return of $48, down from between $60,001 and $100,000 in 2001. It paid $36,696 to the Romneys in 2011.

Romneys Favored

The current investing strategy favors the Romneys over the charity because they get a guaranteed payout, said Michael Arlein, a trusts and estates lawyer at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.

“The Romneys get theirs off the top and the charity gets what’s left,” he said. “So by definition, if it’s not performing as well, the charity gets harmed more.”

The trustee for Romney’s CRUT is R. Bradford Malt, chairman of the law firm Ropes & Gray LLP, and manager for Romney’s various family trusts as well as his personal attorney. Ropes & Gray has also been for years the main outside counsel for Bain Capital.

If the CRUT maintains the same investing strategy, assets will continue to shrink, said Jerome M. Hesch, a tax and estate planning attorney at the law firm Carlton Fields. The trustee acted prudently in protecting against losses during a stock market decline, he said.

Nevertheless, “what’s going to go to charity is probably close to nothing,” Hesch said.

Never Before Seen Footage of Secret Mormon Temple Rituals

Lawrence O'Donnell taunts Tagg Romney

MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell ridiculed Tagg Romney on Thursday night, saying the oldest Romney son has "never actually taken a punch or thrown a punch."

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Billy Graham’s Debate Day Present to Romney – MORMONS NO LONGER LISTED AS A CULT

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson

It’s an odd coincidence, don’t you think, that just in time for the latest debate, Billy Graham decides Mormonism isn’t a cult after all? Right when Romney’s Religious Right-friendly agenda needs the Evangelical vote the most?

You know it wasn’t the cookies and drinks Mitt Romney, Billy Graham and Graham’s son, Franklin, shared on Thursday that warmed the cockles of Billy Graham’s heart. It was a simple matter of political expediency.

On Thursday, when they met, Mormonism was a cult on Graham’s website. On Tuesday, the offending passage was gone. Like Moses on Sinai, Billy Graham on his mountain-top in Montreat, N.C., changed the religious landscape with a snap of his fingers.

The pathological liar, Mitt Romney

By Sam Smith

A little over a month ago, I wrote about Romney’s unusual capacity for lying, but in the weeks that followed, have come to believe that I was too cautious. What we seem to have is not merely a bad politician but a pathological liar who is psychologically disoriented to a degree found, for example,  only in about one in a thousand repeat juvenile offenders.

Consider, for example, this assessment of Romney by Michael Cohen in the Guardian:

Romney persists in repeating the same lies over and over, even after they've been debunked. This is perhaps the most interesting and disturbing element of Romney's tireless obfuscation: that even when corrected, it has little impact on the presumptive GOP nominee's behavior.

This is a pretty good description of pathological lying. Here’s another from the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry:

Falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, may be extensive and very complicated, and may manifest over a period of years or even a lifetime.

Wikipedia offers these characteristics of the disease:

The fabricative tendency is long lasting; it is not provoked by the immediate situation or social pressure as much as it is an innate trait of the personality.

The stories told tend toward presenting the liar favorably. For example, the person might be presented as being fantastically brave, knowing or being related to many famous people.

Some might argue that Romney is actually a sociopathic liar, defined by one scholarly site on deception as a person  who is “often goal-oriented (i.e., lying is focused - it is done to get one's way).  Sociopaths have little regard or respect for the rights and feelings of others.  Sociopaths are often charming and charismatic, but they use their talented social skills in manipulative and self-centered ways.”
There is, however, something oddly robotic about Romney’s behavior, including a bizarre smile that does not fade whatever the topic,   suggesting not deliberate falsehood with a stealthily conceived goal so much as an unthinking soldier over-drilled in the art of mendacity.

Just in the past few days, Romney has been caught lying about several things that an ordinary good liar would probably avoid.

- He made up a fictional account of his time as a Mormon missionary in Paris complete with misleading descriptions of his economic conditions at the time and the state of his bathroom.

- He was found to have misstated his residency status in two states at the time that he was launching his bid for for governor there.

- His campaign has run an ad featuring an Ohio auto dealer claiming that Obama’s auto firm bailout had cost dealer jobs in the state. While it may have caused that dealer jobs; in fact, across Ohio dealership jobs increased.

Only one of these lies – the residency issue – was significant because of the benefits it might produce, i.e. making it legal for Romney to run for Massachusetts governor. The other two were trivial, easily exposed, and ultimately pointless.

Romney – unlike, say, a Nixon or Clinton – lies out of habit and nature rather than out of perceived necessity. And he doesn’t just exaggerate; he makes up wholly fictitious tales.

Romney has been greatly aided in this by the demise of American journalism, which now - like much of the country – considers any message to be a reasonable facsimile of reality and, further, one from which one may, with impunity, “walk back” should it prove embarrassing. The days when the conventional press was more loyal to the truth than to favored sources has well passed and now honesty has no embedded press corps to cover it.

What is not clear about Romney, however, is whether his propensity for deception is a personally developed dysfunction or whether it is the result of what can fairly be called brainwashing by the Mormon Church, where he rose from missionary to bishop.

Here again you can expect no  help from the conventional media which is afraid to question the role of religion in our culture or politics for fear of seeming biased. And so the press has not dared to look into the scary history and practices of the Mormon Church even as they affect someone running for the White House.

As we’ve noted in the past, Romney is not your average run-of-the-mill three hour a week Christian. When he was young he was a Mormon missionary. He went to a Mormon university, Brigham Young. He was a ward bishop, a home teacher, a church counselor, and later president over the Boston Stake, a collection of congregations with over four thousand members. He always tithed to the church, and by 2011 his family’s annual contribution was around $2 million.

No one who has held such a high position in any church has ever before ended up within a handful of percentage points of the presidency.

Further, no one has come this close to the White House who has been subjected to a level of mental manipulation such as takes place during one’s rise in the Mormon Church.

Read, for example, this by former seminary principal and teacher Ken Clark on “lying for the Lord:”
 
Evidence presented in this essay establishes that when the church image or its leaders needed protection it was and is, okay to fib, deceive, distort, inflate, minimize, exaggerate, prevaricate or lie. You will read quotations by church leaders who admitted that deception is a useful tool to protect the church and its leaders ‘when they are in tight spot,’ or ‘to beat the devil at his own game.’ They admit engaging in moral gymnastics; that God approves of deception - if it's done to protect the ‘Lord's Church’ or ‘the brethren’ as the leaders are called. .  .

I went into this further in my piece last month but another quote is particularly revealing:

As a full-time Mormon missionary from 1975 to 1977, I lied for the church countless times. Like my colleagues in the South Dakota-Rapid City Mission, which served the Dakotas and adjacent areas, I spoke truthfully about my background, but touted many Mormon teachings that contradict the Bible. After my mission ended, however, I examined these doctrines more closely. The harder I tried to reconcile the contradictions, the more evident they became. So, after extensive prayer and study, I resigned my church membership in 1984. . .

I can't remember all of my missionary lies. Some were small, others grandiose, but all were false and misleading. Here are ten I'll never forget.

1. We're Not Trying to Convert You
2. The Bible is Insufficient
3. We're the Only True Christians
4. We're the Only True Church
5. We Have a Living Prophet
6. The Book of Mormon is Scripture
7. You're Saved By Works
8. People Can Become Gods
9. You're Born Again By Becoming a Mormon
10. Temple Marriage is Required for Eternal Life

This is what Romney was teaching regardless of what sort of bathroom he had.

He was trying to sell people a faith with false promises and false descriptions, including that of the real character of its founder.

Whether this reflects his intrinsic character or whether he has been indoctrinated into the art of deceit we will probably never know. But what we can be sure of is that we don’t need a president so chronically and irredeemably committed to telling lies.