11 Ways Mitt Romney Shows His Rich-Guy, Ayn Randian Cluelessness

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10News reports that Romney's "Phantom Park" elevator will cost about $55,000, including delivery and installation, and will transport cars from a groundlevel garage down to a 3,600-square-foot underground parking bay. The company that makes the contraption has made similar car elevators for Harrison Ford and Britney Spears, according to the report.

The car elevator is part of a massive expansion project that will quadruple the size of Romney's $12 million beach home. News10 reports that the renovations are on hold until after the 2012 election.

10News has video of a Romney-style Caddy lift in action; the reporter says it can be used to move other things, too -- perhaps a few $300,000 dancing horses.

5. "Don't...stop the foreclosure process." If you're busy razing your $9 million California beachfront home so you can build a $12 million mansion where the old one used to be, foreclosure is likely the last thing on your mind. And if your knowledge of economics is based on your tenure at the helm of a "vulture capitalist" firm -- a company that existed for the sole purpose of buying up other companies, sometimes bankrupting them, and then selling them off for the sum of their parts for the enrichment of your investors, the foreclosure crisis might just look like a giant free-marketpalooza to you.

At the time Mitt Romney met last October with the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review Journal, Nevada ranked number one among the states for housing foreclosures. When asked how, if elected president, he would address housing and foreclosure problems in the U.S., Romney responded this way:

One is, don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up.

Romney did aver that there was some merit to the Obama administration's idea of helping people who are facing foreclosure to refinance, but with this caveat:

...I'm not signing on until we know who's gonna pay and who's going to get bailed out.

Video is here.

6. "I can't have illegals!" If you have a 2.5 acre lawn surrounding one of your three homes and you're running for governor, chances are you're not going to mow that lawn yourself. Even 99-percenters hire people to cut their grass. So when Texas Gov. Rick Perry laid into Romney at a CNN debate last October for hiring a company that had undocumented immigrants on the Romney lawn crew, he looked kind of petty. That is, until Romney responded in such a way that made it seem like, were he not running for office, he'd have an entire household staff composed of underpaid, undocumented people drawn from developing nations. From ABC News' The Note:

"So we went to the company and we said, look, you can't have any illegals working on our property," said Romney. "I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals."

Video is here.

7. Romney casts himself as "middle class." Pay no attention to the 11,000-square-foot home -- or the other two homes, including the one with the 2.5 acre lawn -- or to the estimated $250 million net worth or the four cars: Mitt Romney wants you to know that he's part of the 99 percent. From a September town-hall event, as described by Raw Story's David Edwards:

Millionaire Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he was seeking better tax policies for people in the middle class like himself. 

"I think it's a real problem when you have half of Americans — almost half of Americans that are not paying income tax," the candidate told a group of supporters at a town hall event in Florida. "My own view with regards to tax policy is that we ought to provide help to the people that have been hurt most by the Obama economy, and that's the middle class."