Republicans aren’t just in favor of lowering taxes; now they’re applauding wildly complex efforts by the wealthiest Americans to avoid paying billions in taxes by shipping capital to other countries.

“It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on Tuesday. He was defending Mitt Romney, who, as this morning’s editorial in The Times notes, appears to have the most elaborate history of tax avoidance – offshore tax havens, disputed sheltering mechanisms, complex trusts – of any major presidential candidate in history.

Invest in the Cayman Islands, Mr. Graham seems to be saying. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

That peculiar vision of the American way doesn’t go back very far. Mr. Romney’s financial practices aren’t unusual just because he is one of the wealthiest candidates ever to run; it’s because previous well-to-do candidates would have been embarrassed to admit they had gone so far to enrich themselves at the public treasury’s expense.

As Steve Rattner, the financier who has helped manage Mayor Bloomberg’s money, put it on ABC’s This Week last Sunday, “I actually was with a very prominent private equity guy last night who said he’d never heard of some of the things Mitt Romney has done in terms of putting money offshore, in terms of having a $100 million I.R.A., basically getting an interest-free loan from Uncle Sam on the taxes, on all that money, until he brings it home.” (Mr. Rattner was the auto-bailout czar under President Obama.)



What’s changed in the Romney era? Tax accountants for the richest Americans have become more sophisticated and aggressive, of course, and the Internal Revenue Service barely has the resources to keep up. (Largely thanks to budget cuts demanded by Republicans.) Mr. Romney is using some of the same techniques that businesses like Apple have perfected to keep billions in profits from being taxed, which obviously help raise the deficit that Republicans decry.

And because taxes are now abhorrent to those same Republicans, there is no longer any civic pride in paying them, even among officials supposedly dedicated to public service. As Senator Graham put it, Congress created tax loopholes, so why not take advantage of them?

To hear him tell it, stashing money in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda is exactly what Congress wanted rich people to do, just as lawmakers have used the tax code to encourage home ownership or charitable donations. What really happened, of course, is that lawyers and accountants have taken advantage of a poorly written, patched-together tax code to find loopholes that were never intended by Congress.

The $5 trillion in assets held by offshore tax havens costs the federal government $100 billion a year, according to the I.R.S. But when tax-writing committees try to end such practices, they are often shut down by powerful financial lobbyists.

If Mr. Romney were to be elected, it would be his Treasury Department that would be hurt by such tax-avoidance practices, and his I.R.S. that would have to crack down on them. Based on even the little we know about his financial practices, it’s hard to see how he could look his I.R.S. commissioner in the eye.