When the Romney slime, and the Romney Super-Pac slime, start to hit Rick Santorum, he’s going to need some responses. And the best defense is a good offense.
So here, in the spirit of “love your enemies, and bless them that curse you,” is some free advice for the Santorum campaign: ask Mitt Romney whether the $3 million Swiss bank account revealed by his 2010 taxes - but not disclosed in his previous financial statements - had been declared on previous tax returns. The alternative is that it was declared only in 2010, and only in response to the IRS FBAR amnesty program for taxpayers who had illegally neglected to mention their holdings at UBS and other havens of bank secrecy. That program was started after the government squeezed thousands of names of U.S. tax cheats out of UBS.
It’s not a hard question to answer, if you have access to the 2009 return, which Romney continues to withhold. So it needs to be asked directly, and persistently.
Yes, it’s possible that there was an innocent reason for having $3 million stashed in an account held by one of the leaders of the Swiss tax-evasion industry. But “diversification,” without more, is hardly adequate.
This is a no-lose proposition for Santorum. Reminding voters that he’s running against the sort of guy who can leave $3m in a low-interest account for no apparent purpose is good; if the purpose was really tax evasion, that’s even better.
Just asking the question, “Did you participate in an IRS amnesty program for tax cheats?” is a win; as LBJ said, even if you can’t prove it, you can make the SOB deny it. And no one is going to pay much attention Romney’s whining about unfairness after his “Pants on Fire” attempt to put a McCain adviser’s words in Barack Obama’s mouth.
Live by the slime, die by the slime.
But of course $3,000,000.00 isn’t very much money. I mean just the other day I found that much in change in my sofa that fell out of my pocket back in… well I can’t recall when. Who can keep track of such piddling amounts?
Not only that, you don’t need a tax dodge for that loose change, either. Failure to disclose the money that falls in the cushions of your sofa is not considered tax evasion. You only have to declare what you *know* you have, not what you suspect you might have had before you misplaced it.
Remember the Steve Martin bit (back when he still did stand up) where he claimed that “I FORGOT” is the universal excuse for everything we might do wrong.
“Didn’t send in your tax returns? I FORGOT!”
Whoo…this could be the one we’ve been waiting for.
I’ve been less than impressed with Baingate and Mitt’s low tax-rate is no crime. But tax evasion’s a fairly solid disqualifier, no? Spiro went spiraling down for that I think. The field is so weak that he still might squeak out the Primaries, but he’ll be deeply wounded in the General.
Tim Geithner takes a little bit of the edge off though.