LOL – do you often go to the checkout counter with two “10% off” items and demand 20% off?
If Cognitive Dissonance! is the Number One threat to the Republic, why is it not bolded, italicized, and CAPITALIZED to increase its emphasis over mere VOTER FRAUD!?
Fair’s fair. I’ll admit it - I haven’t released my tax records either.
In my defense, I’ll plead that I’m not running for President. Just like all of the people you listed.
Now some people who have released at least four years of their tax records: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Rick Santorum, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon.
Seriously, when you find yourself being more secretive than Nixon, it should be a wake-up call.
I think he probably paid zero or very, very little for several years - all totally legal, but not something that would endear you to voters.
Plus, there might be many accounts in foreign banks - again, not illegal - that also would not look good for someone trying to explain why the USA is the best place in the world to invest money.
2010 is OK to release, but not 2009. The obvious inference is the 2009 tax amnesty, which would mean he’d been illegally evading taxes for years before that.
Eh, we already know he has money in foreign banks. I guess we’d know about more accounts if he released more tax-returns, but I don’t think simply adding detail to a story everyone already knows about is more damaging then withholding his returns have been.
The voter fraud doesn’t matter. No one cares if he voted in the wrong state. Lots of people care that he hasn’t released his tax returns. Again, the damage of hiding it is worse then just taking what very little damage would come from revealing it.
Its not the tithing thing. No one cares about his tithing amounts except devout Mormons. States with large Mormon populations are going to vote for him anyways. And he’s known he was running for President for years. If he was concerned about what other Mormon’s might think about his tithing levels, presumably he would’ve just spent a few years tithing the “right” amount.
The amnesty thing is vaguely plausible, though it requires Romney to have been pretty dumb and had a serious lack of foresight.
Paying a near-zero effective rate in 2009 doesn’t require any particular stupidity from Romney, and its easy to see how he might think revealing it would be more damaging then hiding it has been. So I think that’s most likely.
Because cognitive dissonance is real, and VOTER FRAUD! is the monster hiding under Republican beds, waiting for them to fall asleep, and then eat them.
And this isn’t that unusual. Arianna Huffington paid little or no federal income taxes in 2002. Huffington Paid Little Income Tax Nor is it illegal.
However, if that is the case, it would drive lower and middle class America bonkers. Here you have people paying income tax on forgiven loans (the mortgage forgiveness debt relief act expires next year, and only applied to principal residences) and on unemployment payments…its going to be hard to understand how Romney can make a million dollars, write off a million dollars in losses, and pay no taxes.
It isn’t the hubris that gets me, its the lack of strategic planning he’s made in running. You don’t have to be very old to remember Geraldine Ferraro or Spiro Agnew’s tax problems - I do and I’m younger than Romney. And how those tax problems caused considerable issues for them.
I want a President capable of looking ten years out and thinking through plausible what-if scenarios. Twenty or thirty or forty would be better. If Israel bombs Iran, and we go to war in support, what are likely outcomes? How about if we give them support without committing troops? How about if we sit back and do nothing? To me, to be able to run through those possibilities, to be able to evaluate the analysis and data you are being fed, that is the most important thing for a President - not if he supports the right to choose or wants to lower taxes on the wealthy - but what he believes the long term impact to our country is of holding those positions (and whether I come to similar conclusions, that I think low tax rates for the wealthy is not going to be an economic kick in the pants for the United States is a sticking point for instance). Not sanitizing your tax returns when you’ve been running for President for as long as Mitt is simply not thinking ahead. Its Palinesqe in its competence (maybe no one will make a big deal about my unmarried teenage daughter being visibly pregnant).
I voted ‘other’ - he doesn’t want to release his tax returns because that would play into the Obama strategy of trying to find distractions to occupy the news cycle until the election, so that the focus doesn’t get put on Obama and his spectacular failure as president.
Look at all the speculation you people are engaging in without any information about his taxes at all. We all know that the minute the Democrats get hold of all that data they will start ‘questioning’ it day in and day out. They’ll wonder about possible motives for certain deductions, they’ll raise hell if he tithed too much or too little to the church, every tax shelter he took will be used against him, yada yada yada. It will not stop the clamoring for more information on the demagoguing of his wealth - it will increase it.
It’s entirely possible and even likely that he took every legal deduction he could - because he hires tax lawyers and accountants to look after that, and they would be failing in their professional responsibility if they let some tax deductions go by because of their political beliefs or because they felt Romney should be paying more in tax. Romney would not be wrong in doing this, and would be doing what everyone else does - including Obama and the Clintons and probably anyone on this board who makes enough money to hire a tax preparer.
But that won’t stop Romney’s opposition from turning every single deduction into a hammer to use to beat on him. Populism and wealth envy still plays in Peoria, and the Democrats have precious little else to run on, so that’s the game. And Romney’s not playing.
So you’re willing to simply take his word that he’s of upstanding character. Of course you are.
He lost all pretence of serious discussion at “spectacular failure as president.” It’s kind of funny that he ended with a populism comment a day after Romney went Full Birther. He might as well have said something as far out of left field as “Taxers… the new birthers” to be taken as serious.
Dangerosa makes a good point that I’ve wondered about. How many millions would it have cost him to tell his accountants four years ago to be sure his effective rate was at least 30 percent, and that there was no unpatriotic-seeming holdings in there (remember, this is the party based on the flag pin). Was it poor planning? Was it that it would have cost too much?
I think the best answer isn’t in planning per se, but in the lack of prediction that this election cycle it actually matters. It wasn’t at the forefront of GWB or Kerry, because there were other issues at play. Now? Now it was an element on its own before Romney secured the inevitability of nomination. He can look to Norquist and his petulance and Cantor for his hostage taking and the rest of the tax policy bullshit that gave rise to the topic evolving independently of Romney’s wealth or nomination.
That is the information, Sam. The very fact that we don’t know is information. That he does not want us to know may barely qualify as speculation, but it is very sound speculation.
Another sound speculation is that he has expensive lawyers who can tell him what he cannot get away with, what he can get away with, and what he can probably get away with if he has expensive lawyers. I very much doubt he is hiding any actual crime, what he is hiding is what they are all hiding, how much our tax system is buggered to the advantage of the affluent.
Of course, if the Goddess so wills, perhaps an actual crime would be discovered. Odds are a hundred to one against, but the payoff is huge and the price is a penny. Plus, I haven’t had a genuine case of the giggling fits in far too long.
I voted “paid no taxes”, and i’d go so far as to speculate he may have claimed a refund in one or more of the past few years.
While Kerry’s taxes per se weren’t an issue, Kerry’s wealth - or rather, his wife’s wealth, was. I don’t think it was an issue with GWB running against Gore, and while both men are wealthy, neither has the Romney/Heinz level of wealth. They also all released returns, which made it clear how wealthy they (or their spouse) were and what sort of taxes they were paying (and what they were sheltering).
And Romney fell for it. By not releasing his tax records he played right into the liberals’ hands.
If what you were saying had any connection with reality, then all Romney would have to do to end this issue would be release his records, like other candidates have done. But he refuses to do that.
So put down the kool-aid. This isn’t an issue because Obama is making it one. It’s an issue because Romney has made it one. If one candidate hands his opponent an issue, his opponent’s going to use it.
If Romney’s done nothing wrong with his taxes, why is he working so hard to avoid any questions about them? If he thinks the deductions he took are justified then why is he hiding them like they’re a shameful secret? If the Democrats say he should have paid more taxes, then Romney can explain why he shouldn’t have paid more taxes. Or are you admitting that Romney would lose that argument?
While you might wish that the only issue of this election was Obama’s spectacular failures, some of us think that things like tax policy and the deficit are important issues worth talking about.
Or that he was confident he could stonewall his way into never releasing the information at all. Quite a few of his partisans, including right here, are demonstrating that expectation to be well grounded.
Okay, I stand corrected. Hubris and lack of complete total strategic planning. “You guys think they will ask for more than a year of tax returns? I mean, sure my dad gave 12 years to avoid any possible cloud, and the standards been close to a decade, but do you think I can use these aggressive international domain tax avoidance schemes, that are aggressive but probably will pass the IRS, and not look like a total douche to voters that pay 30% in Federal taxes like much of the middle class? Oh, great, I won’t look like a douche and no one will ask me for more than a year with the promise of another year of returns. That’s settled then.” :o
Nice line. I’ll definitely mark that down as a rule to live by. Pithy.
I respectfully disagree that it necessarily demonstrates a lack of complete total strategic planning (hubris notwithstanding). I have no idea whether this is conventional wisdom or I’m somewhat alone in claiming it’s a stand-out issue this campaign season in ways that would have been unpredictable four years ago. I do think his advisers (and he) should have at least thought about the possibility that there would be a ‘release the tax forms’ kerfuffel, but decided the ElvisL1ves strategy of waiting things out overrode the possibility (and cost) of there being such a high demand. That relative tax rates would be so much on the electorate’s mind–however they got here–was (IMHO), largely unforeseeable.
That doesn’t mean that he shoudln’t have considered the five to ten million dollar hit he’d have taken had he ensured that his tax rates were above 15 percent. Then again, I have no idea what it might have cost him. Major reshuffling of investments to bring them into domestic holdings? At what cost and how public would that have been? What about the figure. Five to ten million a year? Holy cow, that’s some serious duccuts to be ‘spending’ if you’re not even sure it will be that major of an issue.
On the other hand, I’d love (from a it’s good to watch brilliant people at work) to find out that this was part of some overall plan. That given his net wealth, an extra fifty million wouldn’t hurt him (choke) that much–that in October he’ll “relent,” release the forms, and they’ll show not only a high marginal tax rate but a huge amount of charitable giving.