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A GOPer with a fully functioning brain?
I see why Mitt was forced out of politics by the MAGA cult.

Mitt Romney states the obvious:
"We have reached a point where any mix of solutions to our nation’s economic problems is going to involve the wealthiest Americans’ contributing more."

"Today, all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed for a cliff: If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23%."

"Consider, for example, the cavern of the capital gains tax treatment at death for those with enormous estates. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario using Elon Musk as a proxy. If he had originally purchased his Tesla stock with, say, $1 billion and held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24% federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit.
Why? Because under the tax code, capital gains are not taxed at death. The tax code provision known as step-up in basis means that when Mr. Musk’s heirs get his stock, they are treated as if they purchased it for $500 billion. So no one pays taxes on the $499 billion capital gain. Ever."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/opinion/romney-...

...held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24% federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. ... Because under the tax code, capital gains are not taxed at death.

I thought there was still some max estate value above which capital gains ARE taxed Federally at death?

And of course, states have their own limits, like, for instance, NY.

I'M glad he as ridiculed for saying "Russia is the most dangerous threat"

Here's hoping Putin gets some of Ukraine.

I won't bet on it but I hope he moves on Europe one day and Europeans get drafted into a shitstorm.

Which side ridiculed Romney for those comments?

:)

Good.

Got what they deserve.

I wonder if he's been reading this.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/...

The Second Estate
How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy
Ray D. Madoff
A revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them.

Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair?

Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.

This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.

I am reading the book in stages. I have to stop when my head is about to explode. 🤯 Usually after about half an hour.

I see why Mitt was forced out of politics by the MAGA cult.

Mitt was a goner in the GOP anyway. He voted "guilty" in the second impeachment.

Remember GOP Gov of Florida, Charlie Crist? He left the GOP in 2010, because he couldn't stand the hard right swing of the party. He served in the Federal House, as a Dem, from 2017-22.

Former GOP Gov of Michigan 1969-1983, Bill Milliken, several years ago, wrote a blistering letter to the editor in, iirc, the Traverse City newspaper, objecting to the party's far right swing.

The GOP of today is working to shred the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, that the GOP overwhelmingly supported in the 1960s.

The GOP has not been the party of moderate, thinking, people, in quite a while.

Steve

The GOP has not been the party of moderate, thinking, people, in quite a while. ~Steve

So true Steve. I used to be a republican, the party left me long ago!
Now it seems the GOP is the Gullible, Old Patsies party.

The MAGA cult and before them to Tea Party are just useful idiots, used and abused by the oligarch class.

This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.

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