Presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have been publicly going at it, trying to discredit one another in order to gain the frontrunner status in the GOP primary race. At the GOP debate in Florida, Romney accused Gingrich of being an "influence peddler" for his lucrative role consulting for the Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) Freddie Mac, which many right-wingers blame for the subprime mortgage mess. In his response, Gingrich said "there are many different kinds of government-sponsored enterprises and many of them have done very good things" and likened Freddie Mac to electric cooperatives and federal credit unions.

But neither electric cooperatives nor credit unions are GSE's and this is the second time in recent presidential debates that Gingrich has used this line. Freddie Mac -- from which Gingrich has reportedly received $1.6 million in contracts -- is a quasi-governmental entity which the U.S. government backstops with loans and guarantees.
Very few institutions fit this description. On the other hand, credit unions are private nonprofit cooperatives, which are organized under charters authorized by either federal or state agencies. They do not receive funding from the U.S. government. In the case of Freddie Mac, the institution had to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve after its role in the subprime mortgage crisis, so now it is partially owned by the U.S. government.

While Gingrich has stated that he was not a lobbyist for the Freddie Mac, a recently released contract shows that Gingrich reported to Freddie Mac's director of public policy, essentially the group's top lobbyist.

Mitt Romney's 2010 tax returns show that in 2010, Romney and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on $21.6 million in income -- much lower than the 35 percent the country's top wage-earners pay -- and hold millions of dollars in multiple offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax haven. The official spin is that the Cayman accounts provide no particular tax advantage, that they pay higher interest rates and help "attract foreign investors." Romney's campaign counsel, Ben Ginsburg, assured journalists that Romney was in full compliance with U.S. tax laws, and Brad Malt, who operates the Romneys' blind trust, said Romney's Cayman funds are fully taxable and reported to the IRS. That may be so, but Rebecca Wilkins, a tax policy expert with Citizens for Tax Justice, points out that the federal government loses about $100 billion a year to just such foreign tax havens. Wilkins affirmed that the primary advantage to investors of setting up funds in places like the Cayman Islands is to help people avoid taxes. Jack Blum, a Washington, D.C. attorney who specializes in offshore banking and tax enforcement, said offshore investment vehicles allow investors to "avoid a whole series of small traps in the tax code that ordinary people would face if they paid tax on an onshore basis."