Mitt Romney Tax Return: High Income, Low Tax Rate

Mitt Romney Tax Return: Romney Pays 13.9% Income Tax

Mitt Romney released his tax returns after stalling as long as he could. Romney tried to delay the inevitable: the public now sees that he made over $40 million in the last two years alone, paying a 13.9% income-tax rate. This is roughly 900 times the average American salary.

• Mitt Romeny Tax Return: 2010, 2011 Estimate

There's nothing apparently illegal going on with Mitt Romney's tax return, but you'll be immediately struck by how little tax someone so rich is paying. This is probably why he delayed the release for so long: voters can now see how those previously-abstract "tax breaks for the rich" work.

• Mitt Romney and Self-Deportation
  

Mitt Romney and his family give plenty of money to charity (as required by his religion), but they also use offshore tax shelters, and exploit other tax-code loopholes that have one major result: the Romneys probably pay a lesser tax rate than you do.  Romney should thank Newt Gingrich for that, actually: wasn't the 1990 capital gains tax cut a Gingrich thing?

Another aspect of this return that will stick in many voters' craws: Mitt Romney's income doesn't really come from doing any work: this is income returned from his investments. One pays a much higher rate for income actually earned.

Again, this is perfectly legal: the 1% has lobbied hard for this to be the case, and they're quite determined to keep it that way. Mitt Romney isn't really that much of an outlier, here: all of our presidential candidates are rich: they have to be in order to campaign on a national level. Romney's Republican opponents will not attack him on the basis of his tax return: they cannot do so while still sticking to the GOP party line. However, undecided voters may start thinking a bit more critically about who's getting what under the current tax laws, and who's championing these laws.