By: Guest ContributorJan. 31st, 2012more from Guest Contributor

Rachel Maddow used a clip from Jon Stewart to illustrate the fact that Florida Republicans are about to vote Mitt Romney who is still making off of laying off people in the state.

Here is the video:

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Maddow explained the Bain/Romney Florida wealth connection,

Part of the reason that Mitt Romney is so personally wealthy has to do with Florida. In 1994, Bain Capital, which he was running at the time, bought a medical company that had roots in Florida. In 1996 and 1997, Bain helped the company take over two more medical companies. They also started, as they say, cutting costs. They closed a plant in Puerto Rico, eliminated between 300 and 400 jobs there. They also shut down operations in Miami. That move eliminated 850 Miami jobs. Cut out $30 million in payroll the employees received as salary. Taken out of the Miami economy when Bain shut the plant down. Two years later, Bain made sure Bain got paid.

They had the same company where they fired all the workers take on a huge amount of debt, for the purpose of paying Bain Capital. After the layoffs in Puerto Rico and Miami and the debt, Bain walked away with $242 million for themselves and their investors. In 2002, a few years later the medical company filed for bankruptcy. It was buried under all the debt and it was bankrupt for five years before it came out and was bought by another company. This is one of those deals Mitt Romney worked on while he was running the show at Bain. But then the deal continued paying off for him after he left the company. His arrangement with Bain Capital is that he still gets paid now. So part of why Mitt Romney is worth more money than Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, the Bushes, and Barack Obama combined times two is because 850 people lost their jobs in Miami in 1997.

Making money is one thing. Making money is one thing. Having money is another. This is
something that has received sort of here and there attention in the last week since Mr. Romney released his tax returns, since we learned he only pays a special mini tax rate that is reserved for people who don’t work, but who live off long term investments on their giant piles of money. But making money and having money are a different thing. If you would like to choose between which one of those ways is a nicer way to make a living, just having money and living off the interest it makes? In the big piles is a much easier way to do it. Much more lucrative way to do it. Mini tax rate, 13.9% in the one year he’s given full tax returns, that mini tax rate has not been around forever.

A relatively modern tax loophole says if you’re income is earned on investments you had more than a year, if your income is earned on giant piles of money instead of wages, you only have to pay 15%. Mr. Romney left Bain in 1998 but still every year gets paid a huge amount of money from Bain. Still, now. On the deals he did while he was there, and he pays taxes at that tiny little mini tax rate. Why does that little tax rate exist? It exists because a company called Bain lobbied for it. On this I must defer to the master, Jon Stewart.

Here is the full Jon Stewart video:

After she played the Stewart clip, Maddow continued, “The reason Mitt Romney pays only a mini tax on the money he made closing factories at Bain because Bain uses their share of the money they made closing factor is to lobby for executives to keep paying that rate. So yeah, poor people do have sucky lobbyists. On the eve of the Florida primary, Mitt Romney is getting paid for laying people off in Florida, but money from his campaign and from his Super PAC has bought a on the eve of the Florida primary, Mitt Romney has bought a whole lot of TV ads that make it look like he would be great for Florida.”

So either Florida Republicans are so desperate to beat Obama, that they are willing to vote for a man who made his money by laying off some of their fellow citizens, or they are some of the dumbest people walking the planet. Since the idea that residents of an entire state are idiots, although they did elect Rick Scott, is a gross generalization, the answer must be that Florida Republicans are looking the other way because they want to believe that one of the Underwhelming Four left standing in the Republican primary fight can beat President Obama.

Where do Florida Republicans think that huge stack of cash that Mittens has been using to saturate the state with TV ads came from? Romney got rich by taking money out of the Florida economy and putting it into his pocket. Mitt Romney is still getting rich off of the economic devastation he caused for thousands of Sunshine State residents. Yet, many of these same people who have been hurt by people like Mitt Romney are prepared to vote for him, because they think he would make the economy better for them.

Republican primary voters in Florida can be duped because Romney has outspent his opponents by such a vast margin, but come the fall there will be nowhere left to hide. Mitt Romney may be able to whistle past his job killing graveyard during the Republican primary, but by November, every voter in America will know all about Mitt Romney’s nationwide swath of economic destruction.