Meet the Guy Who Picks Up 15 Tons of Trash Mitt Is Trying to Shortchange

[Omaha Steve]

Thank you AFSCME!

Omaha Steve is a proud AFSCME member.

http://www.emptywheel.net/2012/10/01/meet-the-folks-mitt-is-trying-to-shortchange/

AFSCME has launched a fascinating campaign, introducing people to the current sanitation worker, a former one, and the firetruck maintenance guy who service Mitt’s La Jolla home.

It’s a great campaign for the way it makes the invisible consequences of Mitt’s hatred for government–and the 47%–visible. 15 tons of trash, Mitt’s trash man collects, yet Mitt thinks there should be fewer people picking up his and his neighbors’ trash.

But there’s one more piece missing: Mitt’s efforts to avoid paying his fair share for precisely these services. Remember, right after Mitt bought this home, he tried to claim it lost 45% of its value. When that didn’t work, he hired a lawyer to fight to lower his tax bill paying for precisely these kinds of services. Ultimately, this man worth at least a quarter billion fought for years so he could avoid paying $109,357 over four years.

But he tried to drop his yearly tax bill by enough to support one of these jobs.

I want to look at Mitt’s original claim–that his house had lost almost 45% of its value in less than a year. That claim was higher even than the property decline all the houses in his zip code experienced in the two years after he bought the house.

Working for the Romneys, Streb concluded that the entire 92037 ZIP Code had suffered a 41% decline in average sales prices between the first six months of 2008 and the six months preceding his appraisal in October 2010. He settled on a value of $7.5 million for the Romney home.

Had Mitt’s outrageous claim been successful, he would have saved something like $75,000 a year. This amounts to Mitt, buying a pricey home at a time when any half-witted being knew home values were crashing, turning around almost immediately and asking for a discount for buying at a time of falling values. But for a county struggling with the effects of banksters ruining the wealth of its much more average residents, it amounts to a real churlishness about the common good.

The LAT ends by justifying Mitt’s efforts to save what amount to a few pennies on property taxes.

FULL story at link.