Romney's 2011 tax return

Couple that with lifting the cap on payroll tax deductions and find a way to correct for the regressive nature of sales taxes or else you have a non-starter.

 

Romney's tam held his tax return in order to use it to divert attention away from a possible BIG slip by the campaign before the election.

 

haha....yeah, we're saying the same thing.

 

No, it is a lie. Charitable contributions are not taxes, they do nothing to fund the government, which is what taxes do. Counting them as taxes or adding them to your taxes to make it look like you pay more than you do is a lie, pure and simple.

 

This story really says nothing bad about Mitt personally-- he paid taxes as required and donated to charity generously. The intentionally overpaying tax situation is just funny. The resulting tax rates are not even that different.

The real policy question is whether we should structure the tax code so that private equity guys and other folks in Mitt's position gets to pay a rate lower than those paid by many middle class people, be they construction workers, cops, teachers, doctors, nurses or lawyers. Mitt's tax rate and whatever tax shelters he may have used are just a good example to use in such a discussion.

 

It would make me very unhappy indeed.

 

According to which documents, can you link me to these?

"effective federal personal tax rate" is a weird term.

Does that mean that he's not counting his wife? Or he's counting the little Mittens?

I looked for it on my 1040 and couldn't find the term

 

I am quite aware of that. However, when people look and see that someone paid 14% and they don't take into account all the other money he has given away, they draw a conclusion that he is making too much money, that he is hording his money. I don't believe I insinuated that charitable donations were taxes, did I?

 

Classic.

 

I actually with you here for the most part. I think deductions and loopholes are the biggest problem with our tax code in general. Remove them & lower the tax rates for all. Most Rich would end up paying a higher tax rate if it was 19% with no deductions or loopholes. Most Mid-Class would pay the same or less if it was 16-19%.

 

I really don't understand the big deal, wasn't he always going to release the 2011 tax returns? Good for Mitt for donating to charity...

The real question is what's on the tax returns before them? If he's really always played 13%+ then why not release them?

Even at a best case scenario, this doesn't hurt Obama. All it does is prove that Romney didn't totally f up. If I'm Obama, I ask Mitt during the debate to make his other tax returns public if they look like the 2011 one.

 

Who has stated anything about hoarding or making too much money?

If they pay 14% on millions of dollars of income, that is too low a tax rate, it has nothing to do with how much they save (hoard), give to charity, or earn. It is entirely about the tax rate.

 

But his main deductions were from charities, that's WHY he paid so low, that and most of his income was from investments which is taxed lower.

 

Romney has his own charity he funds to get a tax deduction today, but seems to hoard those assets. The charity has no direct charitable function.

 

And this makes it right to lump charitable contributions in with taxes paid in what way?

The single biggest reason his rate was so low is because we tax investment income at a lower rate than income, this is the disparity that needs correcting.

 

Romney overpays taxes, but at what cost?
Commentary: Romney and taxes? It’s complicated

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Mitt Romney’s complicated relationship with the tax code took a turn Friday, when the trustee of his multi-million dollar family trust revealed that Romney had voluntarily overpaid his federal taxes in 2011.

Why would anyone do that? Because Romney is under a lot of pressure to prove that the rich of this country already pay enough taxes. And perhaps because he decided it was worth it to pay several hundred thousand rather than break a campaign promise.

Earlier in the year, when Romney released his 2010 tax return and his accountant’s good-faith estimate of what he would owe for 2011 once that return was ready to be filed, he said that he’d pay about 13% of his income in federal taxes. See: Romney paid 14% effective tax rate in 2012.

And in response to the unsupported charge by Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid that Romney probably hadn’t paid any taxes in some years, Romney insisted that he’d never paid less than 13%.

Imagine Romney’s chagrin when the accountants told him that his actual 2011 tax bill worked out to less than 13%. The only thing to do was to cut a bigger check to the Treasury.

Overpaying his taxes was certainly a generous and patriotic thing to do, but it also went against the grain of a couple of other statements that Romney had made in the course of the campaign.

Most troubling to the candidate is this statement he made to ABC News in July that “I don’t pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president. I’d think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires.”

But more troubling for the nation is the damage that the overpayment could cause the economy.

Romney has based his campaign on the notion that higher taxes on the “job creators” will imperil the economy and lead to stagnation. The extra that he paid to Uncle Sam now isn’t available to Romney for the vital purpose of job creation.

What if all the job creators did what he did?

 

Yes. Nobody forced him to state categorically that he had never paid less than 13%. His adopted budget platform would have lowered his 2010 tax rate to less than 1%.

It would have been better for Mitt if he had just released all the tax returns a long time ago and owned up to the truth about his past. He's applying for the president's job, and he needs to tell us the truth about his financial history. It's that simple.

 

Actually, I think he did the right thing here, or the best thing given the options. Pays more to make his last statement true and then disclose on the website that you've done so for maximum transparency.

Though after he loses this campaign, he can probably go back to the IRS to collect the difference. That is, unless he wats to run for office again.