What he's hiding

Part of me thought that silly season would end after Romney sewed up the nomination, but it doesn't really appear that way. We're still getting hit by all kinds of stories and some of them should matter to who becomes president and who shouldn't. Here's the deal on the Bain stuff. It's a private equity company that's done very well. Romney was the guy in charge. If he wants to run on that record, fine, but if he wants to claim that he created 100,000 American jobs while he was there (he used this number in the primaries, but seems to have backed away from it), he needs to take his lumps and take the hit for the outsourcing and the jobs lost as well. It just comes across as real weaselly when he tries to take credit for the good things that happened at Bain, but claim he wasn't responsible for any other decisions. He's probably honest in that he was busy chairing the Olympics and wasn't involved in day to day decisions at the company, but if he was still signing SEC documents and attending board meetings for various Bain interests, it's pretty hard for him to say that all the bad stuff happened without him. And he looks like a fool going to the papers for retractions on stories where there is a clear paper trail. That just makes him look like a baby. Does any of this matter? Only a little. Only because Romney has been telling us that it matters. It's one of twenty or so things out there that make you question his character. Nothing completely damming, but plenty to give one pause because you can't be sure that he really gets it. If he had a real economic plan for creating jobs that people could get behind, no one would care. But so far this is all we got. Cut taxes for rich folks and maybe raise taxes on everybody else. And speaking of taxes, that's the other part of this issue. He refuses to release any more tax returns. Especially those returns reflecting the Bain period in question. He's saying it's a witch hunt, but the more he says this and demand an apology, people are left to wonder what the hell this guy must be hiding. We already know that he's got buckets of money. We already know he's never paid the same tax rate the great majority of us pay. We already know he's familiar with banking in the Caymens and Switzerland. So what else can there be. I'm pretty sure what he's hiding that there are a lot of years where he made a lot of money, but didn't pay any taxes. He's mostly been just a passive investor. So it's possible that he's been clearing $20 million a year and through proper tax strategy he may have paid nothing, or even gotten money back from the government. That could sit wrong with a lot of people, which is why he doesn't want to talk about any of this. Anybody else have a guess?