I don't necessarily agree with the premise here — that Romney seems amazingly proud of the fact that he paid the lavish effective rate of 13% on his taxes. True, it's half of what I paid, as a rate, but …
1. We don't really know what that 13% actually represents, given Romney's vague statement. All income, or just salary income (vs capital gains income)? Or, heck, some have suggested that he might be lumping in the taxes paid on real estate and the like in there.
2. We don't know how Romney brought his effective tax rate (of whatever sort, on some level of his income) down so low. Maybe he was giving massive amounts of charity to starving baby whales. Maybe he had fantastic tax lawyers who managed to get it all socked away into exotic offshore accounts. Maybe he used perfectly legitimate and lawful and laudable means.
The capper on both 1 and 2 is that we simply don't know. But we don't know because Romney won't tell us. He's willing to assert "I did go back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years I never paid less than 13 percent. I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year", but _he won't actually show us._
So I don't necessarily condemn Romney for paying 13% in taxes … because we don't know what that means, or how he managed to reach that number.
That's what I blame him for.
Reshared post from +Les Jenkins
This.
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Wire Creator: Are We Supposed To Congratulate Romney For Paying 13% In Taxes
David Simon, creator of The Wire, is outraged that Mitt Romney bragged about paying just over 13% in taxes.
Can we stand back and pause a short minute to take in the spectacle of a man who wants to be President of The United States, who wants us to seriously regard him as a paragon of the American civic ideal, declaiming proudly and in public that he has paid his taxes at a third of the rate normally associated with gentlemen of his economic bene…
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