My fellow progressives, can i ask you a question?
Before i do, let me reinforce something that should already be very clear. I think Romney would make a godawful president. I wouldn’t vote for him in a million years, i think that his politics generally are pretty awful, and i also dislike the fact that he has awful politics while also apparently having no actual policies that he’s willing to talk about in any meaningful way. It’s also clear to me that his ideas about taxation are completely antithetical to what i consider fair and decent and reasonable.
Now to the question:
I might be missing something here, but can anyone explain to me what we would gain by having Romney open his tax returns for us?
It seems to me that there are three main possibilities here:
(1) That Romney has broken the law and illegally evaded paying taxes that he should have paid, by failing to declare income or by taking illegal deductions.
(2) That Romney has, due to cautious deductions and a sense of fairness, paid considerably more taxes than he was legally obligated to pay.
(3) That Romney has taken all the deductions that he was allowed by law, and has, as a result, paid an effective tax rate that is lower than many people making much, much less money than him.
Option (1) is incredibly unlikely. Romney has been pursuing the presidency, in one way or another, for over a decade, and he and his advisers would have made damn sure that they took no deductions or other tax minimizations that might be legally questionable and jeopardize his political career even with people who agree with his politics.
Option (2) seems pretty unlikely simply because, like most people, Romney isn’t going to hand over extra money to the government just for the sake of it.
That leaves us with Option (3). But if that’s the case, i’m not sure why we need to see the returns. I already know that, as a guy who makes a lot of money on capital gains and dividends, Romney pays a tax rate of 15% on a large proportion of his income. I also know that there are probably deductions associated with property ownership, business expenses, and other financial dealings that he can legally take to further reduce his tax liability.
While the tax code might sometimes be rather opaque and difficult for someone who is not an expert to understand, it is not a secret. Every legal deduction that Romney has taken is something that is written right there in our public documents. My position on what constitutes a fair tax rate, and on Romney’s suitability to be president, doesn’t hinge on seeing his tax returns.
I fully support a revision of the tax code that would require people with Romney’s levels of wealth to pay more taxes. I believe that income based on capital gains and dividends should be taxed like ordinary income, and i don’t buy the arguments that doing this would lead to a sudden and dramatic unwillingness to invest. I think the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, and i think that the top marginal income tax rate should be increased. But i can’t think of a single one of my opinions on tax reform that would be affected by seeing Romney’s tax return.
It also seems that most of you arguing in this thread have, like me, pretty much made up your mind about what sort of tax system we need, and also about Romney’s lack of suitability to be president. So i’ll ask again: what purpose will be served by making the returns public?
