Saturday, July 14, 2012

What Romney's Career Shows

This passage from James Surowiecki's post on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital epitomizes why I can't imagine Romney winning the election in November:

What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars... And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.

No matter how feckless on the economy Obama may be perceived to be, I just can't imagine that a majority of Americans will see Romney as a likely improvement. 

1 comment:

Mme Burch said...

Except that the myth is: we could all be Romney, if only we worked hard enough. I think people see their potential selves in Romney. He's living the dream...the problem with Obama is, he hasn't fully, clearly, and repeatedly articulated a new dream.