This is one of those times I’ll simply give you the tease and ask you to link over to Gawker’s The Bain Files: Inside Mitt Romney’s Tax-Dodging Cayman Schemes:

Today, we are publishing more than 950 pages of internal audits, financial statements, and private investor letters for 21 cryptically named entities in which Romney had invested… Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital…  Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama’s fiscal approach and his money managers’ embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren’t made until years after he left the company. [...]

According to a 2010 investor letter from its advisors, the tenuous economic recovery underway in 2010 was at risk of a Republican victory in the midterm elections:

With an economy that is still highly dependent on fiscal support, the outcome of the midterm elections could lead to gridlock that would have major ramifications for the economy. An expiration of stimulus would be a significant fiscal drag.

Let that one sink in: An expiration of stimulus would be a significant fiscal drag.

As I said in a previous post, media, will you please take Rachel Maddow up on her request to insist that Mitt Romney (and Paul Ryan) give us some straight answers? Or “do you just write down what they say?”

“It’s not what they say, it’s about what they’ve done. And when what they say is some distance from what they’ve done, that distance is the story. This is what the press is for.”

Romney-Ryan-Akin: The “tell ya later” campaign.

Now go.

No Willard, we will not let the questions about your tax returns go.

Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

In a Los Angeles Times article, there is reference to a campaign aide saying Romney was referring to federal taxes, but Romney never said that. … Romney can, if found out not to have paid 13% on his income taxes, deny ever saying he paid 13% on his income taxes over the years, when he was referring to taxes in general. [...]

How then, if the BuzzFlash at Truthout possible scenario proves to be true that the Romneys are referring to all their taxes not just federal income taxes, could they arrive at 13% in taxes.  There are several ways.

If Romney received income as a sole proprietor, he had to pay 7.65 percent in Medicare and Social Security taxes (more than half his proclaimed tax payments).  Then you have retail tax, property tax (and they have plenty of property), you have state income taxes, etc. [...]

But supposing they paid some minor federal income tax – let’s toss out 2%. How could that happen? For one thing, he has an IRA that has been estimated by some at $100 million dollars, which is nearly 2/5′s of his estimated net worth.  Much of his current wealth, while he still is profiting from Bain Capital investments, was earned earlier — and is in assets and offshore accounts.

Gary Berg, a BuzzFlash at Truthout reader, also points out another possibility:

I find it interesting that Romney pointed out his percent of tax paid. If he can remember his tax rate (which actually doesn’t appear on the tax form itself), he should have a decent idea of how much he paid in absolute terms (which is, of course, prominent on the tax form); i.e., saying that you paid 13% in taxes represents clear avoidance of the tax question; e.g. he couid have paid 13% of $100 ($13) and have sheltered $100,000,000 through off shore tax vehicles.

[...]

They never used that phrase. Mitt only claimed to pay 13% in unspecified taxes. [...]

Not a major article in any paper questioned Romney’s avoidance of using the term income taxes; instead, they wrote that he, in effect did say it, when any journalist worth his or her salt should be  be questioning why he and Ann Romney haven’t used the specific term income taxes to discuss how much they have paid in taxes in general over the years.

Please read the whole thing here.