
The Bain Capital Files - stevewillensky
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/08/the-bain-capital-files.html
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smacktoward
_There's a lesson this for me and my partners. Everything we publish to our
investors should be written as if it will someday be published in Gawker. And
every action we take in structuring our business, our relationships with our
investors, and our relationships with the entrepreneurs we back should be
conducted as if it will someday be published in Gawker._

This is nothing new. When I was studying political science in the early '90s
it was called "the Washington Post Rule": a canny politician should never put
anything in writing unless he would be comfortable seeing it on the front page
of the _Washington Post_.

(Why the _Post_? Woodward and Bernstein:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_President%27s_Men> I have to believe the
rule goes back even further than that, but presumably before their time it was
called something else.)

~~~
MikeCapone
Warren Buffett's been telling all his managers for decades that they shouldn't
base their decisions on what is "this side of the line of legality" but rather
on what they wouldn't mind "seeing printed on the front page of the New York
Times".

I'm sure the idea's been around for even longer than that, though. I bet
Benjamin Franklin (a publisher, among other things) must've had a choice quote
about that...

~~~
expralitemonk
"Abstain from all appearance of evil."

1 Thessalonians 5:22 King James Bible

I'm sure if you dug around in Buddhist or Confucianist writings you'd find
something similar. Being mindful of how your actions look is very useful in
avoiding trouble.

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ck2
I don't care if you are progressive or conservative, dem or repub, if you are
running for president I want to see a full disclosure of your business and
financial dealings, years of tax returns (which can be forged anyway because
3rd party cannot authenticate with the IRS) and even a drug test.

Yes, a drug test and full physical beforehand. This is the most powerful
office in the land, not some book promotion tour.

~~~
JasonFruit
If all your candidates must be squeaky clean, you're probably ruling out some
of the most able. The most law-abiding, unquestioningly tax-paying,
physically-fit candidate is probably not the person who has the best
understanding of and instinct for foreign affairs, the most ability to
inspire, cajole, and back-scratchingly motivate Congresspeople to cooperate
with important ideas, and the most ability to quickly to make difficult
decisions in no-win situations.

~~~
antidaily
unquestioningly tax-paying?

~~~
JasonFruit
Years of tax returns that have a low percentage are an opportunity for attack
ads even if they're strictly legal. It's politic but unwise to pay more than
you would strictly have to.

~~~
Jach
Returning to your "quick decisions in no-win scenarios", there are going to be
attack ads based on whether Romney does and what they contain or whether he
doesn't and what they might contain, and it's easy to come up with possible
contents likely or unlikely. Maybe it's just me that thinks he'd be better
served by the path of openness in this instance.

Of course, it's just his taxes, and I feel like the only reasoning people are
upset with Romney over this is that they are thinking "What's he hiding? If
you have nothing to hide..." which most of us probably dismiss as bad thinking
in the usual context. If the People want to make it a law for candidates to
disclose their tax information, let it be done, right now he's just breaking a
40 year old precedent. (It seems McCain did the same thing and only released
two years--was there an outcry about that? I don't remember, there were so
many other juicier attacks. If "you're rich!" is the only thing they can
attack you on you're doing alright.)

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snowwrestler
Common advices from corporate lawyers is that the "e" in "email" stands for
"evidence". As in: anything you write in a company email could one day show up
as evidence in court...and from there in the newspaper. Here's a famous
example:

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6142843-7.html>

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ChuckMcM
I am totally not defending the guy, but the question I have is what does the
average citizen expect a 'rich' person to do with their savings? Put them into
a pass book savings account at Wells Fargo and get .7% APR interest with
everything over $250,000 at risk? When you give your money to a venture
capitalist to invest in the startups we read about every day it shows up on
your tax return a "MayField Plaza Partners Equity Fund, LLC" or some such. And
its not like naming those things are easy.

When I rolled over my 401k from Sun into a personally managed IRA with my
broker we put parts into things like "Fidelity Large Cap Fund" or "Emerging
Markets Fund" which were pretty opaque except for the prospectus that came
around once a quarter. So I'm wondering what the outrage is here.

~~~
cromwellian
I expect them to not to have loopholes they can take advantage of that
ordinary citizens can't. For example, Bain converted fees for service into
capital gains. A plumber or electrician can't treat his fees as capital gains,
they are treated as income.

But if you're in financial, you can use all kinds of loopholes -- equity
swaps, blocker corporations, fee-waivers+fund-investment in order to treat
income as cap gains.

Then, if America votes in Romney and Ryan, we may end up with even lower
capital gains rates, meaning financiers can escape most taxes, while ordinary
people are faced with inescapeable income taxes.

I don't mind people investing in risky ventures, but they must pay taxes on
their winnings like everyone else. And as Buffet said, the idea that higher
taxes will scare away entrepreneurs isn't historically supportable. There are
risk takers in every environment, it wasn't like before 1980 there weren't any
entrepreneurs.

~~~
mudil
Perhaps it is not Romney and Ryan's fault. Maybe we need to simplify our tax
system, so everyone pays equal share of taxes? But as it stands now, we have
tax code of thousands of pages, so people in the know will figure out the
loopholes. The analogy would be doing an SEO of a website. Sure I want
everyone's site be optimized. But only people that understand all that is
involved with the SEO process can properly configure pages and a server.

~~~
cromwellian
I'm all in favor of closing loopholes and simplification, but almost every
single mainstream simplification that has ever been proposed has amounted to
nothing more than an attempt to remove progressivity from the tax system. What
makes the system complex is not the existence of more than one tax bracket,
it's the bewildering array of itemized deductions one can take. Most of the
'simplifications' set out to accomplish two goals it seems: 1) simplify code
2) somehow lower rates. Unfortunately, when they try to be "revenue neutral"
by closing loopholes, those hardest hit are the middle and lower class because
of the mortgage interest deduction. So ultimately, many of these plans look
like a tax cut for the rich and raising taxes for the middle class by taking
away their deductions.

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0003
Soon private investors will have DRM over their audited investor reports.

