I think if you really want to make this argument, you shouldn’t cherry pick a comparison. Or at least not do it this obviously.
Of course they do. The roads, bridges, schools, military and everything else the government provides benefit him more than they benefit everyone else. I’m not saying the government gives him more than anyone else- assuming the various rumors about Bain companies getting lots of federal and state assistance are not true - but he uses a lot more of it.
I wouldn’t put it past him to take ten years of paying 2% of his income in taxes and claiming that he had paid a total of 20%.
You missed the point. If he’s not going to play along with the fishing expedition, then releasing this ‘summary’ is stupid. He now looks like he really has something to hide.
I agree with MeanOldLady. Not releasing them and telling the Dems to pound sand could look like a principled stand. But this???
[sub]BTW, a while back my GF speculated that the reason he wasn’t releasing the returns was that he didn’t want the Mormon Church to know he’d been holding out on them.[/sub]
This is a bizarre argument. Explain how Romney ‘uses more of’ the highway system than, say, a guy who owns a semi truck and does business hauling freight. For that matter, how does he even gain more benefit from the roads? The roads are the same for everyone.
Does a man who starts a business and fails use any less of the infrastructure than someone who starts a similar business but succeeds?
I know this is the latest liberal argument - that success is driven by the infrastructure, so the more successful you are, the more of the infrastructure you used. But it’s a ridiculous, silly argument. A guy who makes a hundred thousand dollars hauling wood uses a lot more of the road infrastructure than does someone who makes a million dollars selling his art, or making watches. There is just no correlation between the use of the infrastructure and how much money you make.
Of course, if you want to go down that road, I could point out that the inner cities are huge taxpayer sinks, and people living in them consume a far greater share of the cost of police forces and fire trucks and other services than does a rich guy living on his own farm.
So it’s not the consumption of resources that makes the difference - it’s the mere fact that one person made more money, and therefore ‘benefited more’ from it, right? If so, that’s just the same old liberal argument dressed up in infrastructure clothes - we’re all one big community, so the rich have an obligation to share their wealth with others in whatever percentage the majority of people deem ‘fair’.
Many of us reject that argument on philosophical and practical grounds, no matter how fancy the new clothes are that you wrap it in.
Taking the argument to the logical extreme about paying more in dollars than everyone in this thread combined, you seem to be arguing everyone should pay the exact same dollar amount in taxes regardless of income. Otherwise, he is still going to be paying more than everyone combined.
There is certainly no way he paid a higher percentage than every single person in this thread.
I bet he’s already signed and postdated an amended return to claim those deductions that he passed on earlier. The day after the election, it goes in the mail.
Why do you believe that FICA isn’t a tax that should be counted? We should fully count it for both Mitt and his secretary. That means that his secretary’s tax rate is 4.2% higher than you purport it to be, and Mitt’s tax rate is 0.05% higher than I have purported his to be.
Way to manipulate numbers to try to make it out like middle class people don’t pay as much in taxes as they actually do.
Their question was the first question that popped into my mind when I heard the effective tax rate over that period.
And actually, that link says that they got an answer from the Romney campaign and the answer was that it was calculated by just averaging the percentages…which is kind of a silly way to do it. It may not make much difference, but it might. If, for example, he was making a much higher income in the period when his income tax rates were lower, then it would overestimate the percentage of his total income that he paid in taxes over the whole 1990-2010 period. (Presumably they were lower after Bush cut the capital gains tax than before.)
Few people make the claim that Romney is doing illegal tax avoidance. Pushing the envelope, possibly Swiss Bank Account amnesty, undervaluing assets put into his IRA and given to his kids trust funds, leveraging off shore bank accounts to reduce his tax burden, ad nauseum are all on the table. Reposting from the 15 page Why Won’t Romney Release His Tax Forms thread: Why won't Romney release his tax returns? - Politics & Elections - Straight Dope Message Board
Here’s a linkto the NY Times Op-ed by Michael J. Graetz, a professor of tax law at Columbia, was the deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy from 1990 to 1991, and an assistant to the Treasury secretary in 1992, under the first President Bush. Professor Graetz lays out the major things that might be embedded in the tax returns. It’s a great and short read. The items are (some are my paraphrase and some are quotes):
- Maybe took part in the IRS amnesty for Swiss Bank accounts (but Graetz does not think this one is plausible)
- IN 2009 Romney paid less than the 13.9% paid in 2010. Possibly legal but probably politically unpalatable
- “Putting business assets into an individual retirement account invested in a Cayman Islands corporation allows Mr. Romney to avoid the “unrelated business income tax” — a 35 percent levy — on at least some of his I.R.A.’s earnings”
- “The I.R.A. also allows Mr. Romney to diversify his large holdings tax-free, avoiding the 15 percent tax on capital gains that would otherwise apply. His financial disclosure further reveals that his I.R.A. freed him from paying currently the 35 percent income tax on hundreds of thousands of dollars of interest income each year”
- Given his IRA is worth $20-100 million (and can only put in $30-50k per year), the presumption is “that Mr. Romney valued the assets he put in his retirement account at far less than he would have sold them for.”
- “Mr. Romney’s Cayman Islands and Bermuda corporations also probably allowed him to avoid limitations on deductions for investment expenditures that would otherwise apply.”
- Grossly undervalued “gifts” to a trust set up for his kids. This one could result in massive IRS penalties since this is now valued at $100 million, while the IRS limit is $1 million
His father ran for President and made of point of sharing 12 years worth of returns. From wiki: His subsequent release of his federal tax returns – twelve years’ worth going back to his time as AMC head – was unprecedented and established a practice that future presidential candidates would follow.
The Senate typically requires more than 2 years for confirmation to a cabinet or even a subcabinet post.
IMHO the President should be held to the highest standards of the land. Romney has been thinking about running for President at least since he was Governor. He sure as hell shouldn’t be a candidate if he hadn’t cleaned up his tax returns way back then. Looks like he arrogantly didn’t and now he’s between a rock and a hard place. I hope he gets hoisted by his own petard on this. Candidates to become the most powerful person in the world should be able to stand the scrutiny of at least a decades worth of tax returns.
In 2010 I made $100 and paid $50 in tax.
In 2011 I made $10,000,000 and paid $0.
50% and 0% averages to 25%. Well, no wonder he thinks the wealthy deserve a break on their taxes.
Beyond the issue of this firm bold-faced lying for their favorite client, They can easily be technically telling the truth while being completely misleading.
They say his avg payment was about 20% and that his lowest was about 16%. They can say this while in a sense technically telling the truth even if the effective numbers are much lower because of tax revision in the future. He can go back from say 3 years from the date of tax payment and use all of loopholes retroactively to get refunds.
So the avg of the initial payments for all of those years might be 20% while the effective rate becomes say 9% after all his juggling. (I hate to say it was his juggling, I’m sure people much smarter than him figured this stuff out for him for a salary)
If he revises his tax burden for the years he has revealed after the elections are over he can go down to as low as 9% because of his charitable donations (which is wonderful and whatever of him but it’s not justified for someone to take tax funds out of our government to buoy the Mormon church out of whack with all scale of reason). Even if you’re not going to tip pay the damn rake at the table like everyone else who’s winning hands.
He has said that if he didnt take every exemption possible and pay as little as was possible that he shouldn’t be a presidential candidate in the first place so we can almost completely assume he will do so.
I don’t believe he’s done anything illegal. I believe that his tax returns probably don’t look too different from those of anyone else with Romney’s amount and type of income. I’m also not interested in criticizing his charitable contributions, or the deductions that he chose to take for those contributions.
But answer me this, Sam: what do you think (from a political point of view) of the apparent contradiction between these two statements:
Emphasis mine.
Romney trustee Brad Malt, today:
Emphasis mine, again. This appeared on Romney’s own website, so i think it’s safe to assume that it was officially approved.
So, we learn a few things here.
First, we learn than Romney had to make an active decision to claim fewer deductions in order to make sure that his earlier statements about his tax payments remained true. Had he claimed what he was legally entitled to claim, he would have rendered inaccurate his earlier statements about his tax payments. But in doing this, he directly contradicted his statement not paying more than he owed.
Also, the people who have been criticizing him for his tax policies have been doing so precisely because the current structure of the tax system allows him to pay a lower effective tax rate than people earning the median income. This isn’t changed by the fact that he decided, on this one occasion, to claim less than he was entitled to under the law.
Also, having told us that he would feel unqualified to be president if he paid more than he had to, he is now telling that he paid more than he had to. What does this tell us about his qualifications to be president? Surely, had he remained true to the arguments he has been making about taxation, he should have taken all his deductions and said to the world, “Screw you. I did what i was legally required to do, and paid the tax that i was required to pay.” His whole tax policy is based on the understanding that the rich pay enough tax already. He’s made this very clear from day one. Why hand over extra money now?
It seems that, for Romney, the only time when it’s necessary for the wealthy to pay more tax is when such a gesture might directly benefit their political ambitions.
Always happy when my predictions come true – I posted this back in April.
Can you even do that? You can carry over unused charitable deductions that were disallowed because they were too high a portion of your income, but I don’t see anything that allows you simply to choose in which year to take deductions.
Can someone please summarize the “controversy” here? Does anyone believe that Romney is cheating on his taxes? If he isn’t, what’s the problem? I’m not rich but I do take advantage of every legal tax minimization strategy available to me. I’d expect President Obama to do so as well. Why shouldn’t Romney?
You know everybodylikes to hate on Mitt. He seems like a decent enough guy.
I’ve seen a lot of people voice suspicions, but almost nobody flat-out claiming that Romney’s violated any tax laws. The controversy is that he claims the tax burden on the wealthy is too much, while at the same time paying half or less the tax rate as the rest of us.
He’s also claiming that he can lower taxes on everyone and still balance the budget, which may be technically possibly but only by eliminating tax breaks on everything from mortgage interest to charitable donations – which would result in a net tax increase for millions of people. But he doesn’t acknowledge this, in fact he refuses to specify how he will get from here to there.
The controversy is the fact that, with the way the law is set up right now, it’s possible for a gazillionaire to legally pay a lower effective tax rate than someone struggling to make ends meet. And the fact that the Republican party wants to skew the law even further in favor of the gazillionaires. If Romney were just another business owner, at the mercy of the vagaries of the law, nobody would care. But he’s not just at the mercy of the vagaries of the law: He’s striving to become the single most powerful person in the country at setting the law. And that makes it very relevant.
Well, you’ll have to ask Romney why he didn’t take advantage of every legal tax minimization strategy for this years taxes. Oh wait, his accountant says why:
So he did that purely out of political expediency.
No reasonable person has ever though that Romney was cheating on his taxes. Folks with specialized tax lawyers do not cheat on their taxes.
What most thought (and still think) is that Romney has taken advantage of tax avoidance loopholes that are only available to the very, very rich. He does not want the conversation to move in the direction of “what the hell are these loopholes that enable someone with a very large income to pay a much smaller percentage in taxes compared to a regular working family”???
You see, if the conversation moves in that direction, a whole lot of tax loopholes for the rich are going to be put under the microscope. And Romney’s backers do not want that.