Mitt should clear this up. His wife Ann enjoys a very expensive sport: ‘dressage,’ or horse ballet. She owns a dancing horse along with two other people. This is simply the kind of eccentric hobby you might expect from someone who makes the average American’s annual income per day from capital gains interest. The sticking point is that Mitt claimed the horse as a business write-off on his tax returns, and received a $77,000 deduction.
The ballerina horse does not make any revenue, and it’s not part of any other business venture. It’s just a hobby, and part of Anne’s healthcare regime for treating MS. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing whatever works to treat a difficult disease, and no one should begrudge her that. But there is something seriously wrong with claiming a hobby/therapeutic horse as a business. It’s not a business. And Mitt Romney received more money from the government than the average family of four sees in a year simply because he owns a horse. The usual tax deduction for a child is only $1,000. While average families are struggling to make ends meet and while the US government is placing more and more burdens on the average family to pay for Bush’s ill-begotten wars and tax breaks for the rich, the Romney family received a gift from the government worth 77 times a child tax credit because they own a horse.
Romney’s entire pitch for why he should be president is based around the fact that he knows how to run a business… and that America is a business that he can run? Something like that. At any rate, he’s not running on the fact that he was the first governor to pass statewide socialized healthcare into law. He’s not running on the fact that he’s a Mormon bishop. He’s running on the fact that he bought businesses, fired however many people necessary to make the business make a lot of money, then acted as an aggressive corporate loanshark, liquidated the companies that couldn’t hack it, and pocketed the proceeds. Rinse and repeat.
The fact that he thinks a pirouetting horse is a business is a dart through the balloon of his argument for why he should be president. Any child who has ever spent a July afternoon running a lemonade stand could explain to him that his wife’s dancing horse is not a business. He seems clownish, running for president as a businessman, even though he doesn’t know that his wife’s ballerina horse isn’t a business. Either that, or he made a lot of money off of the American people because his tax returns are horseshit.
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