Mitt Romney for President--Part something

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-romney-property-tax-20120806,0,4926772.story

This is more of a fun bashing of Romney than anything substantive, but he's a terrible real estate investor.

A mean person might suggest that the Romneys just don't want to play by the same rules as everyone else and want to dodge their fair share of property taxes.

I'll leave that to a mean person to point out.

Right. IOW, we're doing exactly what the GOPs favor, and they're complaining about it. Which brings us to the tangent thread that was broken off from this one.

 

He paid CASH!?!?!?!

 

But the Chinese and Indians do the same job cheaper and better.

I guess all that Greece needs is a huge stimulus package to get the EU back on track; I am not sure why they don't just do it. I am sure their could spend billions on infrastructure if they wanted to.

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...-in-italy-for-bain-s-deal-skirting-taxes.html

This is very interesting in light of the controversy over when Romney left Bain.

When your tax rate is zero, you don't need the mortgage deduction. (It's just another piece of evidence that Harry Reid is right. )

 

Nope, IRAs IOUs....

 

Just because he paid in cash doesn't mean he had the money laying around. It is not uncommon to use equity loans against other properties to pay cash for a new property.

 

How wealthy would you have to be to do that, though? I'm sure it wasn't in his mattress, I just don't know of anybody making more than 10k a year and under six gazillion a year who use cash to buy a $6 million home.

 

The Romneys would have been stupid to not appeal their assessments. That wasn't evil or illegal.

 

Based on the vast wisdom and expertise I've gained by watching Selling New York, lotsa people pay cash for expensive real estate.

 

Nah, even schleps like me can buy a home with cash. But there's not much point to it with mortgage rates being low. It's cheap leverage.

 

It takes wealth, but that doesn't mean the cash is liquid and that they are just pulling it out of a bank account. One of my friends owns rental properties and he always buys new properties with "cash" because he can generally get the new property for less than what he could get it for if the sale was contingent upon a housing loan. However, he doesn't have that amount of cash sitting in a bank account. What he does is pull equity loans (much easier to qualify for) out on his other properties and uses the cash from those loans to pay for the new property.

Realistically, it is a negotiation technique.

 

This is why I just want to rent for the rest of my life; I will never understand large purchases like this and would probably get screwed.

 

All this is relevant how?

 

It's not. If you go back to my first post on this, I said

 

Not all that mystifying -- the Republicans have the money so they can buy arguments. There are plenty of PhD economists willing to argue against the evidence that cutting government spending increases employment.

So if the University of Chicago's economists say there's a connection, you can't really blame the media and voters for thinking that might be so.

 

The politicians don't. If Mitt gets elected, he'll be blowing out the deficit to stimulate the economy. But by and large, the professors truly do believe. They've talked themselves into it.

They have no choice, really. Politicians (and venture capital pitchmen) know that ultimately what matters in their business is getting the sale. Truth, schmuth. So it's easy enough for them to flim and flam. But professors are defined otherwise. They can't live with themselves knowing that they are bullshitters. So they need to fool themselves too.

 

Good luck doing that in 2009, though. Nowadays it's a bit easier, but there's still a bit of a credit crunch (in that banks don't want to take risks).

Romney paying cash in '09 is evidence of his uber wealth.

And tell your friend NOT to pay off homes in the near future. It's much easier to get an equity line of credit on an existing mortgage than to get a loan on a house already paid off. Ugh.

 

Not to mention Obama himself.

It doesn't make much sense why someone who isn't a veteran would judge another person negatively for also not being a veteran.

 

He defected to Indonesia.

 

I don't think it's that he's judging Mitt negatively; rather he's judging McCain positively. Remember, he worked with McCain in the Senate so he knew that with McCain there was some there there. Not so much with Mitt.

 

I took it as more of an example of a reason to like McCain as opposed to a reason to dislike Romney. Seems most people who run against Romney come away really disliking him, McCain included.