Cue the Mitt Romney outrage machine about transfers of wealth... Via Maggie Haberman, these are some amazing statistics: - For every dollar Mitt Romney's Bain Capital invested in Ampad, it received $20 back in profit'a 2,000 percent return'even though the company went bankrupt.
- For every dollar Ampad's creditors were owed its when the company bankrupt, they received two-tenths of a cent, $0.002'a 0.002 percent return.
- In all, Bain made $100 million on its $5 million investment. Creditors were paid $330,000 of the $170 million they were owed.
So Bain's return was two thousand percent ... while the creditors got back just two tenths of one percent. On a dollars per dollars basis, that means Bain managed to do forty-two ten thousand times better than creditors, even though they both did business with the very same company. I guess the difference was that Bain had the good sense to be the outfit responsible for loading the company up with debt. And in the process, it creatively destroyed nearly $170 million owed to Ampad's creditors.
As the Obama campaign said today in a conference call with reporters, things like this show that Mitt Romney saw his job as making money'not jobs. He was focused on short-term profits, not building a fundamentally sound economy. Romney was amazingly good at earning those profits'thanks to his heads I win, tails you lose approach to business.
As campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt asked, "why did Mitt Romney and his partners always succeed even when the companies failed?" The answer is that Mitt Romney was able and willing to play by two different sets of rules: one for himself, and one for everybody else. That may have worked out exceptionally well for him at Bain Capital, but the question facing the country now is whether that sort of economic philosophy is what we want in the White House.
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