Curt Schilling Is The 21st Century Face Of A Welfare Queen
Where is the outrage from presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney?
One of his political friends – or cronies to use the term he prefers – from Massachusetts, Curt Schilling, declared bankruptcy after bilking tax payers for millions of dollars and recovering his own investments.
Let's face it: Curt Schilling is the 21st century face of a welfare queen.
And fake small government conservatives like Mitt Romney aren't going to criticize Schilling.
After suckering Rhode Island into a $75 million loan for his company, 38 Studios, Schilling is the poster boy for corporate welfare success stories.
38 Studios received the loan guarantee from the state of Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation as state officials lured the company from neighboring Massachusetts in an attempt to deliver hundreds of jobs and added tax revenue to the state.
What they got instead was over one hundred million dollars in unpaid bills from the conservative baseball icon.
Last week Schilling was still crying about the government not doing enough to help him. He complained that he didn't get enough tax credits. He complained that state officials were speaking negatively of Mr. Schilling’s failure of an enterprise and that scared off investors.
Ha! The very state government he owed his business’s existence to?
The guy who racked up over $150 million dollars of debt, $116 million in outstanding bills to the state and over a million dollars in unpaid wages didn't get enough from the government.
What a hypocrite.
In 2011, Schilling told Reuters he had invested $30-$35 million in 38 Studios. According to recent reports, his statement was about eleven percent true. His actual "investment" was about four million dollars – and he paid himself back with Rhode Island taxpayers’ dollars.
Now Mr. Schilling has the attention of other tax payer funded entities: the Rhode Island State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States attorney’s office.
Now there's a tough rotation!
So the taxpayers pick up the tab for the company and they pick up the tab for the investigation into the company they funded.
Now that's the kind of capitalism Mitt Romney can get behind. He knows how profitable it can be to put friends on a company's board, take the money out of said company and pension fund and let the tax payers clean up the mess while he walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars for Bain Capital.
Legitimate small government conservatives should take a real look at the actions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Schilling and decide for themselves if they can afford this kind of "small government" corporate welfare.
About Bill Buck
Bill Buck is Democratic strategist, President of the Buck Communications Group, a media relations and new media strategies consulting business based in Washington, DC, and Managing Director of the online ad firm Influence DSP. He has over twenty years of international and national communications experience. The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CBS Local.
