Personal taxes aside, Romney's wealth built on Bain's offshore tax avoidance

Relatively few of us understand exactly how Mitt Romney has used his offshore investments to reduce his taxes by how much. Romney hopes to use that confusion to claim that all the money he has in the Cayman Islands hasn't actually reduced his taxes, saying straight up that he's gotten "not one dollar of reduction in taxes" from his Cayman investments or Swiss bank account. But the New York Times' Michael Luo and Mike McIntire conclude that personal tax reduction may not be Romney's biggest Cayman advantage:

A review of thousands of pages of financial documents and interviews with tax lawyers found that in some cases, the offshore arrangements enabled his individual retirement account to avoid taxes on its investments and may well have reduced Mr. Romney's personal income tax bills.

But perhaps a more significant impact of Mr. Romney's offshore investments has been on the profit side of the ledger ' in the way Bain's tax-avoidance strategies have enhanced his income.

In other words, Bain avoided the taxes through complicated offshore investment strategies, increasing Romney's profits. Then, Romney's own tax bills on those tax avoidance-inflated profits were, most likely, further reduced by the location of his investments in the Cayman Islands and other notorious tax havens. It's so simple, I wonder why you or I didn't think of that. Oh, right:

...these tax-avoidance strategies are woven into the fabric of Bain's deal making. While hardly a novel concept and not unique to Bain, the inevitable result is that elite investors like Mr. Romney are able to increase their fortunes in ways unavailable to most taxpayers.

And whatever Romney has done with his personal taxes (a question we know much less about than we should, thanks to his secrecy), he created Bain, with all its tax-avoidance strategies. He's asking us to just trust him on that "not one dollar of reduction in taxes" thing when it comes to the years of tax returns he won't make public. Does that kind of trust sound like a good thing to you?