From the dancing horse’s mouth:
Nice try, Mitt. This dodge is so pathetically transparent (you can write any damn thing on a letter and get it notarized – the seal only proves that you’re the one who signed it, not that the contents bear any discernable relation to reality) that it will only chum the waters.
Yeah, this is just going to open up another can of worms for them. Let the mudslinging begin!
What will be of most interest is what the “summary” does not say.
Why release a “summary”? What details does he want to omit?
Hmmmmm. I wonder if this lends any validity to the story that someone had his returns and they were trying to drum up $1M to either release them or not release them?
I haven’t heard anything else about the story, so I apologize if this has already been debunked.
Haven’t people mostly forgotten the whole tax thing, at this point? His tax issue has already been succeeded by a mountain of public embarrassments, and at this point it feels like he’s picking at a scab. I’m struggling to find an angle for this supposed release.
I don’t think the one has anything to do with the other – even if the files were “stolen” in the sense that the original physical media were stolen, any competent tax service would have offsite backups.
Apparently, Romney is so deep in the hole that changing the subject back to his taxes is a net gain for him.
I don’t know if they’ve forgotten, but I think most people have gotten used to the idea that we weren’t going to get any more information. This makes everything all new again.
Maybe because we already knew he was an insensitive plutocrat–which is totally his right and has little to do with actual morality. What we really want is easily-produced evidence that he is not also a tax criminal.
I believe he promised to release his 2011 return when it was completed. He requested a deferral from the IRS earlier this year. If he promised to release his 2011 return, and then failed to, that would be a serious blunder.
ETA: Releasing the summaries of previous tax returns has me scratching my head. I don’t understand why he is doing that: if it is okay to state how much income and taxes were reported on those returns, what is the damage of releasing the whole return? That is puzzling to me.
I like how he didn’t claim all his deductions in 2011 so he could back up his claims earlier in the year.
And donations to the Mormon Church don’t impress me.
Damn, you people are fast. Was going to post about this. The following cracks me up. From an NYT article:
Not news, but at long last, this is the response?
So! He doesn’t address the charge he’s used (perfectly legal) millionaire hocus pocus to lower his tax burden; he just reiterates for the nth time “Hey guys, it’s all legal.” Great job, Mittens, fueling your own sideshow.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t consider the Mormon Church to be a ‘charity’.
I just checked on the right-wing fora, and the response there has been:
Conservative: “See, libs? We told you he would release his info!”
Token liberal: “Um, guys, it’s a summary, and a notarization only means that somebody is willing to go on the record as having seen it…”
Conservative: “We KNEW you guys wouldn’t accept it! 16% to charity! Obama’s transcript! If it was Obama, you’d be bending over to accept it!”
Can’t say I’m surprised at either his non-release release or the blind acceptance on the part of his base, but it’s a little saddening. Hey, at least he kept it in the news…
I’m not sure what Romney’s angle is here. At least with an all-out refusal, he could claim it was a matter of principle, and that he wasn’t going to give in to these kinds of distractions, but now with this non-release release, he doesn’t even have that anymore. Now it just looks like unequivocal obfuscation.
So does this mean he’s just going to release just the percentages for the various years? Like 13% in 1991, 13.5% in 1992… Or will there also be the dollar amounts for the income?
I agree. He had to release the 2011 returns at some point, otherwise by sometime in October people would really be bugging him about them. Better to do it now rather than closer to the election.
The summaries of the previous years is strange. It won’t silence the critics, it just makes it more look like he has something to hide. I don’t know tax stuff that well, and I’m not a political strategist, but it just doesn’t seem like the smartest move. It seems it would be better to just not release anything from previous years and keep saying the same excuses like before, or release them in total like other candidates have done in previous elections.
Not even that. It’s just a summary of information for the entire 20 year period. 13.66% was the lowest percentage of any year, 20.20% was the 20-year average, etc.
I think he’d already released the 2010 return and given a general idea of his tax rate in 2011, so that much was expected and there was little to be gained by withholding it.
That was a very Mitt Romney-ish move.
Go to that disclosures page linked to earlier and check out the medical exams: Mitt’s resting heart rate is 40. 40!! Are you kidding me? That fat slob, Paul Ryan, is a comparatively strained 59.