Mitt Romney will disclose his 2011 tax on Friday, along with a summary going back 20 years. The campaign has published the following summary:
In 2011, the Romneys paid $1,935,708 in taxes on $13,696,951 in mostly investment income.
The Romneys’ effective tax rate for 2011 was 14.1%.
The Romneys donated $4,020,772 to charity in 2011, amounting to nearly 30% of their income.
The Romneys claimed a deduction for $2.25 million of those charitable contributions.
The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year.
The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor’s statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.
GET THIS:
If Romney had taken all of the deductions available to him under the tax code, he would have paid closer to a 9 percent tax rate in 2011.
So he manipulated his return and deductions to make the tax rate he “paid” more palatable to us regular slobs. Here’s what Sen. Harry Reid said:
“When will the American people see the returns he filed before he was running for president?,” Mr. Reid said. “Governor Romney is showing us what he does when the public is looking. The true test of his character would be to show what he did when everyone was not looking at his taxes.”
Mr. Reid also accused Mr. Romney of “manipulating” his 2011 tax return by deducing less than he was entitled to from charitable deductions so that his effective tax rate was higher.
“That raises the question: what else in those returns has Romney manipulated?” Mr. Reid said.
NEWSFLASH: “It is possible, however, that Mr. Romney could still deduct the unclaimed amount of his charitable donations in future tax years, experts said.” (The NY Times)
Possible? I’d say that’s an all day reminder on every Romney accountant’s Outlook calendar for 7:00 AM, November 7th. Romney is not about to give up one thin dime — but he has begun to notice, what with the current climate and all, that it might not go over well if his effective tax rate for 2011 was 9%, so they tweaked it to 14.1%. For show. For now.
TPM: Mitt Romney suggested Saturday in Virginia Beach that President Obama wants to remove God from coins, provoking a fierce retort from the president’s campaign: ”I will not take God out of our platform,” the Republican nominee said after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “I will not take God off our coins, and I will not take God out of my heart.”
In response, Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith called the insinsuation false and an act of desperation: ”It’s disappointing to see Mitt Romney try to throw a Hail Mary by launching extreme and untrue attacks against the President and associating with some of the most strident and divisive voices in the Republican Party, including Rep. Steve King and Pat Robertson. This isn’t a recipe for making America stronger, it’s a recipe for division and taking us backward.”
“At a time when poverty is increasing, when public parks and public libraries are being closed and when public schools are shrinking their offerings and their hours, when the nation’s debt is immense, and when the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together — Romney’s 13 percent is shameful.” — Robert Reich
13% is a bad tip not a tax rate.
Matthew O’Brien of The Atlantic calculated last week that under Ryan’s proposals Romney would have paid not 13.9 percent but .82 percent, or just $177,000 or so on $21 million earned. In fairness, I should note that the Ryan proposal isn’t the same thing as the Romney proposal–the Ryan plan eliminates all taxes on capital gains (the main source of Romney’s income), while Romney’s position is to continue to tax rich peoples’ capital gains, albeit at a lower rate than presently. So Romney under Romney’s plan would pay more, but less than 13.9. — Michael Tomasky
“If you know you’re running for president anyway, I think it’s just part of the price of running. … Obama did so Romney probably should do it. Look, it’s an interesting debate about what tax rates people should pay, how progressive the tax code should be. I personally, if I were designing the tax code, would have a tax code in which Mitt Romney paid more than 13 percent, I would say, given what I know about the kind of investments he made money from. I’m just not a believer that he needed — that there would have been any economic determent to paying more, and I think it just seems kinda weird that he pays a lower rate than an awful lot of middle-class people.” — Bill Kristol
“And when it comes to releasing taxes, that’s a precedent that was set decades ago, including by Governor Romney’s father. And for us to say that it makes sense to release your tax returns, as I did, as John McCain did, as Bill Clinton did, as the two President Bushes did, I don’t think is in any way out of bounds. I think that is what the American people would rightly expect… People want to know that, you know, everybody’s been playing by the same rules including people who are seeking the highest office in the land.” — President Obama
Steve Benen: Mitt Romney has released his tax returns for 2010, and promised to disclose the returns for 2011. When might we see the most recent year? Ed Gillespie told Fox News we’ll probably get them by Oct. 15 — still two months away. (My note: and about 3 weeks before the election!)
Romney said that when he looked back over his tax returns from the last ten years, he found that he had never paid less than 13 percent of his earnings and that we’re just going to have to trust him on that. However, [Rachel] Maddow said, in 2002 when Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts, it was demanded of him that he release tax returns to demonstrate a residency in that state of at least seven years. Romney refused and insisted that the public take his word for it. Eventually it came out that Romney had lied. He was forced to pay Massachusetts taxes retroactively, because when he said that the public would have to take his word that he had paid taxes for seven years as a Massachusetts resident, it simply wasn’t true. Now he wants us to take his word that he has paid at least 13 percent of his massive income over the last 10 years in taxes. Why should we take him at face value? He has demonstrated a willingness to prevaricate on this very subject in his career as a public figure. “The precedent for trusting them on this,” Maddow said, “is not good.” — Maddow: Romney’s history shows he’s willing to lie about his taxes
The first week in July, the RNC’s own Reince Priebus went on Fox “News” Sunday and said the president “isn’t living on planet Earth,” repeatedly criticized the last four years as a “misery,” and called Obama “the most divisive, nasty, negative campaigner” in the nation’s history. Today he went on ABC’s This Week to call Harry Reid a “dirty liar.”
You know what, Reince Priebus? Have Mitt Romney PROVE Harry Reid’s a dirty liar.
Reid Spokesman Adam Jentleson struck back at Priebus by calling Romney “the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon,” and went on to say it’s sad that Romney has “forced his party to defend his decision to hide the truth about his tax returns..”
Republicans can try to cover up for Mitt Romney’s stonewalling all they want, but this issue is not going away until Romney decides to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns. It is sad that the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon has forced his party to defend his decision to hide the truth about his tax returns. As Senator Reid has said, an extremely credible source informed him that Mitt Romney did not pay taxes for ten years. From the one year of returns Romney has released, we’ve seen that he uses secret offshore accounts in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands to avoid paying U.S. taxes. It’s clear Mitt Romney is hiding something, and the only way for him to clear this up is to be straight with the American people and release his tax returns.
How on earth the GOP voting base can be satisfied by this level of secrecy and dishonesty in their presidential candidate is really a testament to their own levels of pathological ideology trumping everything else that should matter to Americans. Keep defending the indefensible and see how far that gets you.
