Mitt Robbery

A report, released earlier this week, revealed that Mitt Romney (as well as the investment firm he ran, Bain Capital) keeps a portion of his vast personal fortune in offshore tax shelters on the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands are a bit of a pop-culture cliche when it comes to the subject of tax evasion–frequent viewers of the Simpsons, for example, may recall a humorous telephone conversation between the Springfield police and a man in the Caymans working on behalf of Krusty the Clown, who at one point said, “I’m afraid I can’t divulge any information about that customer’s secret, illegal account.”

It just goes to support my theory that, while modest wealth can perhaps be had and maintained honestly, no one ever got to the ultra-wealthy column and remained there without doing unethical things or outright breaking the law at some point. The above-noted article quotes a tax expert who estimates that havens in places like the Caymans cost the federal government $100 billion dollars annually, so you could say that at least part of Mr. Romney’s fortune is based on (indirectly) reaching into the pockets of every taxpayer in America and stealing their change. In fact, it’s worse than that–this kind of robbery also affects everyone in America too poor to pay taxes, since it deprives the government of money that could otherwise be put towards social services for the unemployed, as well as the elderly, the infirm, and the handicapped, not to mention funding for infrastructure, postal services, fire departments, police…

Anyway, I thought there might be something to the idea of Romney swiping tax dollars, so I sketched a couple of different approaches to the concept before hitting on the image of a getaway car in a bank robbery. I changed the car to a boat, so it’d more easily play into the idea of escaping to the Caymans, and modeled the boat in my final illustration on one belonging to notorious gangster Al Capone, whose own tax fraud ultimately led to his conviction and imprisonment.