“By and large, [government] gets in the way of creating jobs,” Romney said during a GOP debate last year. But, as the Los Angeles Times noted, “during his business career Romney made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”

On the campaign trail, Romney often touts a successful investment in an Indiana steel company called Steel Dynamics, but he doesn’t mention that the firm had taken advantage of “generous tax breaks and other subsidies provided by the state of Indiana and the residents of DeKalb County, where the company’s first mill was built.”

But that’s a small part of the public largesse Bain enjoyed. Most of the big money the firm brought in during those years was extracted through “leveraged buy-outs,” a reality that Romney doesn’t like to talk about on the campaign trail. Instead, he wants to talk about Staples, which was one of a small handful of Bain’s venture capital deals. The 89,000 people employed at the office supply chain go a long way toward the campaign’s dubious and unsourced claim that Bain “created 100,000 jobs” under Romney’s tutelage. But venture capital represented a small share of Romney’s deals, and it’s important to understand the distinction between venture capital and leveraged buy-outs.

You won’t hear much criticism of venture capital deals like Bain’s investment in Staples. It’s a very basic free-market transaction — investors put money into a company at its early stages in exchange for a share of the company. If the start-up doesn’t pan out, the investors lose their stake; if it grows and matures, they make healthy profit, usually when the company goes public or is sold off. In venture capital deals, investors only make a profit when the company that receives their cash does well.

Leveraged buy-outs are a different creature entirely. Leveraged buy-out firms became so closely associated with the most rapacious and unsustainable form of capitalism in the 1980s, that the entire industry rebranded itself as “private equity” to escape the stigma.

Leveraged buy-out artists also deal with risky companies — usually those struggling to stay afloat — but they don’t actually take on much risk themselves as they structure the deals so they profit whether the target company becomes healthy and grows or collapses, often under the weight of debt piled onto it by the private equity firm itself.

Here’s how the deal works. The leveraged buy-out firm will put down a fraction of the cost of buying an ailing company. The balance of the transaction is borrowed, but the debt goes onto the books of the target company, not the private equity firm — the struggling company basically finances the lion’s share of its own sale.

And here’s the key point: The target company’s debt payments increase significantly, and those debt payments are then written off, reducing its tax burden significantly. This subsidy increases short-term revenues — at the expense of long-term debt — and that, in turn, is paid out in dividends to Bain’s investors and a fat stream of management fees that Romney and his partners skimmed off the top.

(The industry-standard structure of these deals is known as “2 and 20.” Management gets 2 percent of the capital that they invest as a fee, and 20 percent of the profits that the fund realizes. That 2 percent represents between 2-4 times what the average management fees for a mutual fund usually run, and is collected regardless of how the fund does.)

Josh Kosman, author of “The Buyout of America, “How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy,” told Mike Konczai that a typical leveraged buy-out deal decreases a target-company’s tax burden by half. A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that the average tax benefit of these companies’ increased debt-loads in 1980s equalled “10 to 20 percent of firm value,” which, as Konczai noted, “is value that comes from taxpayers to private equity as a result of the tax code.”

This is important to understand as it lays bare the defenses Romney’s spinmeisters have employed to fend off criticism of his past as what Rick Perry called a “vulture capitalist,” and Newt Gingrich described as a business based on “figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.” (Let’s pause here to savor the hypocrisy: a Texas teachers pension fund, one of the largest in the state, is an investor in Bain, and all of its trustees are Perry appointees, and Gingrich himself sat on a board of Forstmann Little. A major competitor of Bain Capital.)

First, those criticizing what private equity funds like Bain do are not assaulting the “free enterprise” system. To the contrary, they are calling out a gamed tax system which guaranteed that Romney and his partners would make healthy profits, regardless of whether the companies they acquired went belly-up. Romney claims that he took risks and shouldn’t be criticized for reaping the rewards, but the game Bain played was in fact antithetical to the free-market model.

Second, one need not be “envious” of Romney’s fortune to be bitter about the means by which it was accrued. Contrary to the line Romney and his flacks have adopted, critics are not begrudging him riches won by hard work and prudent investment. Bain is deserving of our opprobrium for its rent-seeking at the expense of workers at the companies it bought out and through a series of tax subsidies, and Romney’s hypocrisy in suggesting that he was simply a free marketeer must be called out.

Romney talks a lot about “creative destruction” — about how he made the hard decisions that would allow troubled, inefficient firms to grow. But Bain’s interest was to its investors, and it flipped companies quickly, reaping huge profits and often leaving them saddled with debt — often high-interest debt financed with “junk bonds” — that they struggled to service.

That short-term focus didn’t necessarily serve its acquisitions well. Another steel mill, one Romney doesn’t discuss on the campaign trail, is South Carolina-based GS Industries. Bain acquired the company for $24.5 million in 1993, and by the end of the decade Bain estimated that its partners had made $58.4 million on the deal, including “multimillion-dollar dividends” and “annual management fees of about $900,000,” according to the Boston Herald. Bain left the company saddled with over a half-billion in debt, and it filed for bankruptcy in 2001.

“We were doing well and then Bain Capital bought us and they took everything they could out of the company without making the investments we needed to stay competitive,” James Sanderson, who had worked at the mill since 1974 told the Herald. “They ran the company into bankruptcy.”

Sanderson said the fund “replaced longtime managers who had built Georgetown Steel with bean counters looking for ways to cut costs.”

Along the way, 1,750 workers lost their jobs. According to the Herald, “less than a year after taking a controlling interest in the Georgetown plant, Bain Capital cut the employees’ profit-sharing plan twice — lowering the plan’s hourly rate from $5.60 an hour to $1.25 per hour.” The profit-sharing plan was soon phased out altogether.

Layoffs and benefit cuts led workers at the company’s Kansas City, Missouri plant to strike for the first time in four decades. A state legislator accused Bain of union-busting during the 10-week dispute. Sanderson told McClatchy in 2000 that Bain “forced a labor dispute at every location.”

This is the model of “free-enterprise” that Mitt Romney brags about, and on which he built an estimated $200 million fortune. It’s the model on which he continues to make millions of dollars today. According to the New York Times, “the final deal of his private equity career” was a “retirement agreement with his former partners that has paid him a share of Bain’s profits ever since.”

It’s vulture capitalism — one of the many ways in which our bloated financial sector extracts wealth from the productive economy. And we can thank a couple of craven Republican candidates for the fact that we’re talking about it.

Those kind of bizarre untruths were like a series of small gifts for political watchers and late-night comedy writers alike. But just because some of its more colorful wheels have come flying off, that doesn’t mean the GOP clown car isn’t still moving down the road toward the November elections.

We thought we’d take a look at some of the brazen falsehoods offered up by the candidates who remain standing today.

1. Mitt Romney: No Apologies

Mitt Romney wrote a book called “No Apology,” and has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that Obama took a world tour at the beginning of his presidency to issue mea culpas to dastardly foreigners everywhere. This lie is so brazen not only because it never happened, but also because Romney uses the talking-point in speech after speech.

Ironically, as James Taub noted in the New York Times, “In a major speech in Cairo in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s secretary of state, said that ‘for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.’ What was she doing if not apologizing on behalf of the United States — and vowing to put an end to a pattern of misguided policy?”

2. Newt Gingrich: Christmas Warrior

Why should the nutjobs at Fox News have all the fun? In Davenport, Iowa, on December 19, Gingrich revealed the results of something he said he’d “been investigating … for the last three days.” What was it?

Apparently if the president sends out Christmas cards, they are paid for the Democratic or Republican National Committees because no federal official at any level is currently allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And the idea, I think, is that the government should be neutral. … I’m going to go back and find out how was this law written, when was it passed. We’ve had this whole — in my mind — very destructive attitude in the last 50 years that we have to drive religion out of public life.

Guess what? Yup – he just pulled that one out of… perhaps one of those mass emails your crazy right-wing uncle keeps forwarding you.

3. Ron Paul: New Poll Shows That Everyone Agrees With Me!

We’d guess that most Americans haven’t given much thought to Ron Paul’s quixotic quest to return the United States to the gold standard and the regular cycle of booms and crushing busts that long accompanied it.

But on January 3, Paul told his supporters, “today there was a national poll that came out and they were talking about how many people supported the gold standard. How long has it been since they’ve taken a national poll on the gold standard? And guess what? The majority of the American people believe we should have a gold standard and not a paper standard!”

Politifact asked Paul’s campaign to provide some documentation, and they were pointed to a column that referenced three polls showing slim majorities of respondents holding a favorable view of the idea, but they were polls of only Republicans and Republican leaners, and they were conducted in just three states. A real national poll, meanwhile, found that the gold standard is on the wish-list of a minority of Americans.

4. Santorum: A Dingo Is Eating Your Baby! (Or Something)

Rick Santorum is obviously a man who is fascinated with dead babies and inflammatory rhetoric.

Last March, he married the two in an attack on Obama at the Iowa Faith and Freedom conference. Speaking of a wingnutty bill that would require doctors to treat fetuses after “botched abortions,” Santorum said that Obama had opposed the measure when he was in the Illinois state senate, which was true, but then went on to claim that Obama had “said in fact that any child, prior to nine months of gestation would be able to be killed.” He added: “Think about that: any child born prematurely, according to the president, in his own words, can be killed. Now, who’s the extremist in this abortion debate?”

There are some things that shouldn’t even need to be debunked. Obviously, no politician would ever go on record saying something so crazy – that’s just common sense.

But if you really need to verify that Obama never suggested anything of the sort, here’s the fact check.

5. Romney’s Tax Fairytales

Mitt Romney said he wouldn’t release his returns, then he said he’d release them in April and then Newt Gingrich gave him a hard time and he folded. It’s courage like that which makes one wonder how he’d deal with North Korea.

Anyway, the returns show that the “unemployed” candidate made over $40 million in 2010 and 2011, and paid 13.9 percent in taxes on those sums. A paltry figure, and Romney is responding to the criticism he’s received on the topic with two age-old and wholly dishonest conservative talking-points, and an additional sleight-of-hand, all rolled into one juicy bundle of mendacity.

Via Think Progress, this is what he told Univision’s Jorge Ramos in an interview this week:

ROMNEY: One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that’s taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that’s taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent.

RAMOS: But is it fair what you pay, 13 percent, while most pay much more than that?

ROMNEY: Well, again, I go back to the point that the, that the funds are being taxed twice at two different levels.

Mendacious talking point, the first: “double-taxation.” We don’t tax “funds” in this country, we tax transactions. If a company turns a profit on its transactions, it pays taxes on that profit. When it pays money out to investors as dividends, or when investors sell stock at a profit, those transactions are also taxed. No transaction is taxed twice.

Mendacious talking point, the second: that 35 percent tax rate. That’s the top corporate tax rate on the books, but because businesses take advantage of all manner of loopholes, the effective rate – what they actually pay — is actually far lower. It’s a classic conservative talking-point that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, but the reality is that we collect less in corporate taxes than most developed countries. Studies of some of the biggest companies have shown their effective tax rates to be, on average, less than half of what’s on the books.

And the sleight-of-hand: Bain Capital is a Limited Liability Company. This is what’s known as a “pass-through” structure, meaning that the company pays zero in corporate income taxes – the partners’ shares are taxed as income or losses on their personal returns, and in this case, most of the gains are investment income taxed at 15 percent.

In other words, even if we bought the “double-taxation” nonsense and the 35 percent rate, his talking-point still wouldn’t be true.

6. “Nancy Pelosi May Destroy the Entire Gop With a Single Wave of Her Wand”

That headline is borrowed from Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, who reports on a dark conspiracy theory Mitt Romney has embraced to argue that Newt Gingrich is unelectable.

Sargent explains:

There seems to be a very persistent belief in some Republican and conservative circles that Nancy Pelosi is in possession of secret and damning information about Newt Gingrich that would immediately cause his presidential campaign to implode if she leaked it.

A little while ago, Pelosi said in an interview that she was familiar with “a thousand pages” of documents related to the ethics probe of Gingrich that got him bounced from Congress. That triggered the first round of right-wing conspiracy-mongering….

But, alas, she was just talking about the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gingrich’s corruption, which is already widely available. In fact, if you want to read Pelosi’s “secret” treasure-trove of damning info, it’s available online right here!

7: Gingrich: Conservative Republicans Are Secret Liberals

Speaking of which, Newt himself is offering a big lie about his ethics troubles. He said this week that he’d been wholly exonerated in the investigation – an odd claim given that he was sanctioned by the House and it fined him $300,000 to cover the costs of the investigation.