Occasionally, a national politician gets caught telling the truth.

And there’s usually hell to pay for it.

Experienced politicians normally speak in carefully rehearsed, focus group-tested sound bites designed to please more voters than they offend.

Efforts to extract new insights or information from candidates invariably results in a recitation of old position statements.

Washington is broken. Burdening our children with debt. Playing politics. Growing the economy. Building a bridge to the future. Reaching across party lines. Fighting for the middle class.

String enough of that stuff together and you have a campaign speech.

But Mitt Romney had his Joe-the-Plumber moment last week at the Iowa State Fair while talking to a small group of people in what’s called a soap-box event.

Romney was explaining his position on Social Security and Medicare and how he did not want to raise taxes on people to save the programs.

Pretty standard fare in a Republican primary.

When a heckler shouted something about raising taxes on corporations, Romney inadvertently spoke a risky truth: “Corporations are people, my friend. Everything corporations earn goes to people.”

The heckler laughed derisively.

“Where do you think it goes?” Romney asked.

“Into their pockets,” the heckler responded.

“People’s pockets,” Romney said.

By this time a lot of people were shouting and Romney was wishing he was someplace far, far away.

But the “corporations-are-people” clip was seized upon as, perhaps, his Howard Dean moment, like the infamous “scream” that ended Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.

If Romney does win the Republican nomination, this video clip will certainly show up in Democratic attack ads against him.

While it may not have been politically correct to say it, Romney was right.

Corporations are legally entities created to do business. But even the word itself, corporation, comes from the Latin word for body, or a “body of people,” according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Corporations are created by people. They are operated by people and, Romney was right, their profits go back into the pockets of people.

Millions of retirees rely on pensions supplied by corporations or on the dividends they receive from holding corporate stocks. Millions of us work for corporations.

Like people in general, corporations can be run by good people or bad. Witness Enron, which was taken over by a group of thieves who ultimately bilked investors and employees out of their life savings.

And corporations can be very good. Witness the phenomenal growth of Apple Computer, which has generated wealth by regularly adding amazing electronic devices to the marketplace.

Over the past 40 years, millions of Americans have gone from being workers and savers to investors and owners.

This has been through the tremendous growth of workplace IRAs and 401(k)s, most of which are ultimately invested in corporations.

When those corporations do well, we share in their growth. When they do not, as the past several weeks have shown, we suffer.

There are renegade corporations that bend tax laws, ship jobs overseas or treat workers unfairly. Government sets up the rules of the road that allow or forbid corporations to do most of these things.

That they are permissible reflects more poorly on our political system than our corporate economy.

The bottom line, however, is that Romney blurted out an unpopular truth, but a truth nonetheless.

[email protected]