Willard Gekko: still paying 15% on fund fees

[boutons_deux]

Buyout Profits Keep Flowing to Romney

In what would be the final deal of his private equity career, he negotiated a retirement agreement with his former partners that has paid him a share of Bain's profits ever since, bringing the Romney family millions of dollars in income each year and bolstering the fortune that has helped finance Mr. Romney's political aspirations.

The arrangement allowed Mr. Romney to pursue his career in public life while enjoying much of the financial upside of being a Bain partner as the company grew into a global investing behemoth.

In the process, Bain continued to buy and restructure companies, potentially leaving Mr. Romney exposed to further criticism that he has grown wealthier over the last decade partly as a result of layoffs. Moreover, much of his income from the arrangement has probably qualified for a lower tax rate than ordinary income under a tax provision favorable to hedge fund and private equity managers, which has become a point of contention in the battle over economic inequality.

But since Mr. Romney's payouts from Bain have come partly from the firm's share of profits on its customers' investments, that income probably qualifies for the 15 percent tax rate reserved for capital gains, rather than the 35 percent that wealthy taxpayers pay on ordinary income. The Internal Revenue Service allows investment managers to pay the lower rate on the share of profits, known in the industry as "carried interest," that they receive for running funds for investors.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=882047&f=19

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When their was talk a while back of taxing income from fees paid by funds (not gains from personal investments) as normal income (not capital gains), the wealthy fund mgrs bought enough Congressmen to keep their extremely lucrative loophole wide open, even with the Repugs and tea baggers screaming falselhy about deficits.

[boutons_deux]

but the slimey gekko has no qualms about fucking over poor's access to medical care

Mitt Romney’s Dream World: Cutting Billions Out Of Medicaid Will Not ‘Hurt The Poor’

ROMNEY: I take the Medicaid dollars, send them back to the states, without the mandates as to how they have to treat –“

WALLACE: “But you’re also cutting the budget by $700 billion dollars.”

ROMNEY: “Well what I’d do is I’d take the money, send it back to the states, and say we’re going to grow that funding at inflation, the CPI, plus one percent. By doing that, you save an enormous amount of money. I happen to believe that states can do a better job caring for their own poor, rooting out the fraud and waste and abuse that exists within –“

WALLACE: “But you don’t think if you cut $700 billion dollars in aid to the states that some people are going to get hurt?

ROMNEY: “In the same way that by cutting welfare spending dramatically, I don’t think we hurt the poor. In the same way I think cutting Medicaid spending by having it go to the states run more efficiently with less fraud, I don’t think will hurt the people that depend on that program for their healthcare.”

a Congressional Budget Office analysis of Paul Ryan’s very similar block granting scheme found that if federal spending for Medicaid decreased, “states would face significant challenges in achieving sufficient cost savings through efficiencies to mitigate the loss of federal funding.” “To maintain current service levels in the Medicaid program, states would probably need to consider additional changes, such as reducing their spending on other programs or raising additional revenues. Alternatively, states could reduce the size of their Medicaid programs by cutting payment rates for doctors, hospitals or nursing homes; reducing the scope of benefits covered; or limiting eligibility,” the budget office concluded. As a result, enrollees could “face more limited access to care,” higher out-of-pocket costs, and “providers could face more uncompensated care as beneficiaries lost coverage for certain benefits or lost coverage altogether.”

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/12/19/391765/mitt-romneys-dream-world-cutting-billions-out-of-medicaid-will-not-hurt-the-poor/

[Wild Cobra]

Government-Sponsored Sinner

Who would have thought that Republican voters would prove so accepting of sin? At least when it’s committed by a white guy, like the serial philanderer Newt Gingrich, who betrayed not one but two wives while they were enduring serious medical difficulties.

In the latest New York Times/CBS poll of Iowa Republicans, alleged philanderer Herman Cain’s once impressive support shifts to the new front-runner, Gingrich, whose richer history of marital deceit is not a problem even for the self-described evangelical Christian voters who favor him over Mitt Romney by a ratio of 3-1.

It is the first time that I have felt sympathy for a candidate experiencing the prejudice directed at a practicing Mormon. Clearly the ultimate of “squeaky clean” doesn’t cut it for a presidential contender of that faith among Republican Christian “values voters,” even when he is compared with a sexual roué of Gingrich’s considerable magnitude.

Or perhaps it is Newt’s peerless capacity to mask moral hypocrisy with the appearance of religious propriety, first as a Protestant and now as a Roman Catholic, that endears him to other Republicans who wear their religion on their sleeves. Many of those were willing to tear the country apart over the sexual wanderings of a Democrat in the White House, but now they are quite willing to send someone of Gingrich’s reputation to the Oval Office. We are speaking of a politician who was having an extramarital affair with a congressional staff member 27 years his junior, now more appropriately his third wife, during the very years when he was so energetically stoking the Clinton sex scandal.

But Newt did manage to cooperate closely with the Democratic president in passing the “welfare reform” legislation that in effect ended the main federal poverty program. Given that 70 percent of those covered by the gutted welfare program were children, it is at least consistent that the former House speaker now favors further aiding those children by wiping out the long-standing restraints on the exploitation of child labor.

Gingrich also cooperated successfully with President Clinton on the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which legislated drastic cuts in the capital gains tax benefiting the wealthy. In addition, he was a great partner for Clinton in whipping up enthusiasm for a broader agenda of deregulation that set the stage for the housing mortgage bubble and resultant Great Recession. It is Gingrich’s hypocrisy concerning these economic matters that will prove more troubling as his chances of becoming president increase.

Given that Gingrich was on the payroll of Freddie Mac to the tune of $1.6 million, how in the world will he be able, in a one-on-one debate with Barack Obama, to logically make what has become the standard Republican case: that it was liberal do-gooders at the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who forced the banks to make bad housing loans?

The honest answer, politically awkward of course, would be to admit that those agencies were government sponsored only on the risk end, and as for profit entities they were owned and traded by investors in the stock market. They got in trouble for the same reason Citigroup did, because the obscenely huge bonuses of their top executives were driven by their profit performance and not the quality of the home mortgages they backed.

The packaging of hugely profitable but eventually toxic mortgage securities, with the GSE seal of approval, that is at the heart of the economic crisis was the result of a Republican-engineered deregulatory mania that Newt abetted and Clinton supported. A mania that Sen. Obama criticized, but not Gingrich, who was a highly paid booster for Freddie Mac even as the housing market was imploding.

The private/public GSE model of the two housing agencies in which the risk but not the profits was carried by the public is the very arrangement that Gingrich is on record as celebrating as late as 2007 when the crisis was visibly under way. Gingrich favored it as a model not just for housing but even the space program. “I’m convinced that if NASA were a GSE, we probably would be on Mars today,” he declared in a post on the Freddie Mac website on April 14, 2007.

Although Gingrich now claims that when he was on the Freddie Mac gravy train he was simply giving objective advice as a “historian” that sought to improve the agency’s performance, the truth is quite the opposite. Obama will no doubt delight in quoting back to Gingrich his assertion that “while we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about changing their role or the model itself.”

Gingrich, who ran into trouble with the House Ethics Committee when he was speaker and paid a $300,000 fine, is himself a variant of a GSE, having turned his government backing into a hugely profitable enterprise. After he left office, his various personal business enterprises had revenues of about $100 million. Last week in South Carolina, Gingrich scoffed at the idea that he needed to work as a lobbyist; after all, he noted, he is paid $60,000 a speech.

You would think that with a sorry personal and political record like Gingrich’s—and there is so much more—the Republicans would never nominate him as their presidential candidate if they expected to win. But I wouldn’t rule it out, for the driving faith of the GOP has become the notion that the toxic mixture of moral hypocrisy and unfettered greed is a formula for victory. Newt could be their man.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/government-sponsored_sinner_20111208/

====

Repugs and their "Christian" "family values voters" love scumbags. :lol

vs Willard Gekko, The Jobs/Company Destroying predatory capitalist.

Will be very entertaining to watch the flip-flopping battle royale, scumbag vs moneybag.


It will be hilarious if the entire Repug power structure and almost all of the Repugs in Congress are against Noot, but Willard Gekko implodes into a pile of gaffes, handing the nomination to Noot.


Willard Gekko vs Noot Slimebag

Representin the Repugs perfectly


Willard Gekko's $10K bet was pure "in your faces, 99%" macho grandstanding and adolescent gotcha game-playing.

This group of plutocratic Repug assholes is irrefutable evidence of how morally and socially bankrupt and perverse the Repugs are, and that true of the entire charade of American "democracy".


Gingrich is unelectable.

The majority the Repug Congresspeople, the Repug power structure, and Wall st (giving their money to their boy Willard Gekko) don't want, would detest, Gingrich as their candidate.


Willard Gekko also slimed Barry for not bombing the drone in Iran.

"GOP = officially buttf*cked"


but since so many other people already knew about the phrases's KKK/nativist/xenophobic/exclusionary/white-supremacist usage, one would think that Willard Gekko's deep pockets could pay for researchers on this staff to reduce his foot-in-mouth outbreaks.

or maybe Willard was desperately dog-whistling to those hate groups.


Buyout Profits Keep Flowing to Romney

In what would be the final deal of his private equity career, he negotiated a retirement agreement with his former partners that has paid him a share of Bain's profits ever since, bringing the Romney family millions of dollars in income each year and bolstering the fortune that has helped finance Mr. Romney's political aspirations.

The arrangement allowed Mr. Romney to pursue his career in public life while enjoying much of the financial upside of being a Bain partner as the company grew into a global investing behemoth.

In the process, Bain continued to buy and restructure companies, potentially leaving Mr. Romney exposed to further criticism that he has grown wealthier over the last decade partly as a result of layoffs. Moreover, much of his income from the arrangement has probably qualified for a lower tax rate than ordinary income under a tax provision favorable to hedge fund and private equity managers, which has become a point of contention in the battle over economic inequality.

But since Mr. Romney's payouts from Bain have come partly from the firm's share of profits on its customers' investments, that income probably qualifies for the 15 percent tax rate reserved for capital gains, rather than the 35 percent that wealthy taxpayers pay on ordinary income. The Internal Revenue Service allows investment managers to pay the lower rate on the share of profits, known in the industry as "carried interest," that they receive for running funds for investors.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=882047&f=19

==========

When their was talk a while back of taxing income from fees paid by funds (not gains from personal investments) as normal income (not capital gains), the wealthy fund mgrs bought enough Congressmen to keep their extremely lucrative loophole wide open, even with the Repugs and tea baggers screaming falselhy about deficits.

[boutons_deux]

Another video exposing GeKKKo and who Bain/PE really works:

Romney's Goal for the Companies Bain Acquired: "Harvest Them at Significant Profit"


Here’s a video of Romney in his early years at Bain, explaining his purpose in acquiring companies was to “harvest them at significant profit.”

No one should be surprised. After all, Bain Capital wasn’t in the business of creating jobs. It was in the business of creating profits.

The two goals aren’t at all the same — as Americans whose jobs have been eliminated or whose wages and benefits have been cut know all too well.

For years, higher corporate profits have come at the expense of fewer jobs and lower wages. Business leaders and financiers have been “harvesting” like mad, leaving most Americans behind in the dirt.

Romney’s main selling point to voters is his so-called “business experience.” Yet America can’t afford this sort of “business experience” in the White House.

To the contrary, we need someone who doesn’t see the economy as profits to be harvested, but as people who need more and better jobs.

In 2012 that person is Barack Obama, not Mitt Romney.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11827-romneys-goal-for-the-companies-bain-acquired-harvest-them-at-significant-profit