Success Is Politically Correct; Tax Evasion Isn't. (Tell Your Friends)

The media is attacking Romney now in a bald attempt to prop up Gingrich, because Gingrich can be beaten. If Newt ever were to get the nomination, the drumbeat would sound, you can here it now: Obama is a 'family man' and Gingrich is a 'family destroyer.' They will say that Gingrich is a right-wing flip-flopping egomaniac control freak. They will then compare that to the 'New Obama' a moderate who's plan for hope and change is succeeding so we should 'stay the course.'

They won't be able to do that if Romney is the nominee. So they are attacking him and labeling him a cold ruthless corporate raider, an enemy of the blue collar worker, and many things I won't repeat here. Set aside the completely ignored fact that democrats and republicans (including Romney) are essentially indistinguishable from each other on a wealth basis. There are plenty of wealthy politicians, including Hillary Clinton ($30M), John Kerry ($240M), John Edwards ($50M) and Obama's entire cabinet. Why didn't they get the water boarding treatment the press is giving Romney?

I could find hundreds of similar examples--even the NBA's Ron Artest:

I love Obama. I love Obama. Everybody does. A lot of people do. Well, I guess if you pay (high) taxes you don't.

Artest made about $6.5 million last season. No surprise that hypocrisy is alive and well -- millionaire liberals are throwing stones at Mitt from their glass houses.  

Lets also dismiss the clearly false cries of rape and looting, the left is full of false charges. For example, NRO's  Reihan Salam shows us how tilted the playing field is against truth.  It's not Romney destroying union jobs, its Teachers Unions destroying jobs Romney created or saved.

Consider the experience of UniMac, a laundry-equipment manufacturer in Marianna, Fla. UniMac plays a prominent role in When Mitt Romney Came to Town, a 28-minute documentary heavily promoted by the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future. According to the film, Bain Capital took over UniMac and wrecked it. If you believe the ominous narration, Bain’s managers fired workers such as Mike Baxley and Tracy and Tommy Jones as they slashed costs and eventually shut down the plant. According to a report by Elizabeth Williamson in the Wall Street Journal, however, the three employees actually flourished and were promoted under Bain. Only after Bain sold the plant to the private-equity arm of a Canadian teachers’ union did the plant close. After that shutdown, UniMac’s operations shifted not to some emerging-market sweatshop but to Ripon, Wis. The three workers parlayed their experience at UniMac into a new washing-machine sales-and-service business. Far from being crippled by UniMac’s demise, the workers upgraded their skills and plunged into the new entrepreneurial economy. 

Getting back to the issue, after dispensing with the crap. . . the basic charge is that Romney is a successful capitalist, and that through Bain he created wealth for himself.  Guilty!  He's an American Success.  But there is so much more to the story. As a venture capitalist, Romney created thousands of jobs:

Among Bain Capital’s investments under Romney, the large job creators are clearly Staples and Sports Authority. Both of these were small, young companies when Bain Capital invested in them. Bain invested in Staples when it had only one store, so there were likely fewer than 200 employees at the time. Bain appears to have invested in the Sports Authority when it had fewer than ten stores. Unfortunately, there are no public data to say how many people were employed at that time. At the end of 1998, Staples had more than 42,000 employees, Sports Authority had almost 14,000, Gartner Group had almost 3,000, and Steel Dynamics had over 500. So at the beginning of 1999, when Romney left Bain Capital, these four companies alone employed almost 60,000 total employees. While some of the job growth at Sports Authority came from acquisitions, there is no doubt that these four companies created tens of thousands of jobs over the period.

Fast forward to today. By the end of 2011, Staples had about 89,000 employees. Sports Authority is now a private company. The last time it reported employee numbers, in 2006, it had 14,300 employees. In addition, Gartner Group had over 4,400 and Steel Dynamics had over 6,000 employees. Using the most recently available data, these four companies alone employed almost 125,000 total employees.

 The false charges of looting are addressed in that same article:

A Wall Street Journal article mentions four companies--American Pad & Paper (Ampad), Dade Behring, DDI, and Stage Stores--that Bain Capital made very profitable investments in and took money out of; later, the companies went bankrupt. What the article does not tell you is what happened before and after those bankruptcies. When you add it all up today, even in these investments, it looks likely that Bain Capital created jobs overall.

Far from looting these companies to line his own pockets, Romney created opportunities for success that wouldn't otherwise exist, and he did it with private capital.   (Compare the Obama method of looting the taxpayer to fund failing firms like Solyndra, Evergreen, Ener1, Amonix, etc.) And everything Romney did was above board.  He paid taxes according to the law:

Congress has held since the 1970s that carried interest deserves to be taxed at a lower rate because it is at-risk capital that only materializes if a fund invests wisely, and because when you tax something--such as risk taking--you get less of it. Mr. Romney didn't write this "loophole." He is merely following the law that Senate Democrats like Chuck Schumer have spent years protecting.

Compare that to the unprecedented number of Obama Political Appointees who were charged with tax evasion.

Every system is capitalist, it is just a matter of who controls the capital -- the Romney method, freedom and free markets allocate capital, in the Obama method, the inefficient government allocates capital. In fact, our capitalist system depends on venture capital to function: venture capital-backed companies were responsible for 21 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 2010 while creating 11 percent of the nation's private sector jobs.   

• 21 percent of 2010 GDP came from VC-backed companies
• 11 percent of 2010 private sector employees worked for VC-backed companies
• 17,000+ IT companies have been VC-funded
• 4,800+ healthcare companies have been VC-funded
• 900+ clean technology companies have been VC-funded
• 90 percent of software jobs were created by companies funded by VC 
• 74 percent of biotechnology jobs were created by companies funded by VC
• 72 percent of semiconductor/electronics jobs were created by companies funded by VC
• 54 percent of computer jobs were created by companies funded by VC
• 48 percent of telecommunications jobs were created by companies funded by VC
• 88 percent of the sales from the semiconductor/electronics industry comes from companies funded by VC
• 80 percent of the sales from the biotechnology industry comes from companies funded by VC
• 46 percent of the sales from the computer industry comes from companies funded by VC
• 40 percent of the sales from the software industry comes from companies funded by VC
• 39 percent of the sales from the IT services industry comes from companies funded by VC.

Another set of amazing facts about venture capital is provided by this brochure.

• For every dollar of venture capital invested from 1970 to 2010, $6.27 of revenue was generated in 2010. 
• Annual venture investment equals less than 0.2 percent of U.S. GDP.  
• Annually, VC-backed companies have generated revenue equal to 21 percent of U.S. GDP.

Romney has experience living and creating jobs for the American Dream. Comparing Romney to Obama we find that Obama wants to remake America in his dream, rather than create opportunity, he will continue to destroy opportunity in his quest for increased government control of capital.  Liberals want an inefficient government to allocate capital, according to their whim.

So far as we know, everything Romney did was legal. All participants invested in Bain voluntarily--because Romney had good ideas. Letting the media excoriate him for it, while ignoring rich Democrats, Cabinet appointees who haven't paid their taxes and a President who seems stuck on "pass this jobs bill," is discriminatory bias. Allowing Obama to continue to loot the taxpayers to fund progressive whims and destroy the American Dream is a reason to vote him out of office this November.