Dana Milbank Achieves a New Height of Ridiculosity

It is important that you read this latest piece of trash by Dana Milbank before you continue on with my post.

Go on.  Read it.  I know you don't want to, but for the purposes of this lesson, you need to.

There.  Finished?  Great.  What did we learn.  Well--what we learned from Dana Milbank is that MAKING MONEY IS UNETHICAL.  That's right.  UNETHICAL.

Let's review the bidding, shall we.  Here's the timeline:

1997:  Bain Capital leads a group of investors in buying a majority share of the company newly privatized Italian telephone directory company.  Bain invests 36M Euros out of the total 853M Euros.

2000:  As Milbank reminds us, "during the dot-com bubble" Telecom Italia bought back all the shares of SEAT that it didn't own--for 14.6B Euros.

2003:  SEAT value 3.7B Euros

2012:  SEAT value 57M Euros


That's it folks that's the timeline.  Here are Milbank's thoughts: "More troubling than the Bain windfall were the responses to Bloomberg from Bain and the Romney campaign. Bain noted that it was “in full compliance with all tax and reporting requirements.” A spokeswoman for the Romney campaign argued that Romney and Bain “partnered with a new management team to transform this company, and grow it into a tremendous success.” A tremendous success that quickly toppled, like a child’s tower."

So by my reading--THREE FULL YEARS after selling the company at the height of the dot-com bubble (isn't his what investors would want) and a year after leaving Bain for the Salt Lake Games, the telephone directory company was valued at a quarter of what it sold for--and this is somehow ROMNEY and BAIN's FAULT?  YGTBSM.  Did it ever occur to Milbank that maybe, just maybe at some Bain staff meeting, some young banker poked his head up and said "you know what--the internet and the mobile phone explosion is going to kill the manual phone directory business--we have got to get out of this.  We owe it to our investors"? Let us not forget folks, at the time of the sale, Romney was running the Olympic Games in Salt Lake--not Bain.  But that doesn't matter.  Bain made the right move, and it created value for its investors.  Did Telecom Italia make a bad move?  Of course--but they certainly had their own smart people advising them to PAY 14B Euros.

Milbank goes on to take criticize Bain's and Romney's ethics further, by criticizing them for knowing the tax law and following it in order to limit their exposure.  Again--it would be UNETHICAL to do otherwise, as Bain's ethics were bound up in returning investor value, not paying more taxes than it was legally obligated to do.

Which brings me to my final point--and that is, the inference made in this memorable paragraph: "
Romney almost certainly didn’t break the law by putting his money in Switzerland or the Bahamas, or by paying an income tax rate of 15 percent. He didn’t necessarily break any laws by creating a $100 million 401(k).  The question is whether such things are fair, or whether Romney has exploited a system that allows rich people like him to get richer at the expense of less wealthy taxpayers."

Well Mr. Milbank--is it "fair" for some to take a home mortgage deduction while those without mortgages are unable to do so?  Is it "fair" that certain people get to take the Earned Income Tax Credit while others are denied it?  Of course these things are fair, and one reason they are fair is that they are lawful, and they represent what is permitted under our system.  Romney's tax rate--largely due to investment income--is the result of our system's privileging of investment income as a way of incentivizing more of it.

The only ethically questionable thing about Milbank's column is the impact this ridiculous man will have on an eight year old child.