The Reason Behind Mitt's Latest Dodge

Mitt Romney's run into more than a bit of trouble this week trying to dodge the issue of releasing his tax return, something pretty much every presidential hopeful has done during campaign season since Nixon.  He's even gotten his son Matt in on trying to change the subject to...you guessed it...President Obama's "real" birth certificate.

Josh Marshall makes a pretty damned good educated guess as to why Mittens is jumping through any hoop he can find in order to prevent any squinting at his tax numbers:  It's because Romney would prove the Buffett Rule.

This is Romney’s problem. While we don’t know the specifics of Romney’s tax returns, we know enough about his finances and sources of incomes to know that he is the poster-boy for the Buffett Rule. As Romney likes to say, he’s unemployed. He doesn’t draw a salary. But he seems to still be making big big money off capital gains which are currently taxed at a very low rate. He doesn’t seem to have drawn a salary at any time recently. So he likely pays no payroll taxes. And that’s before you get into legal but aggressive tax-sheltering. It seems virtually impossible that Mitt Romney doesn’t pay the sort of effective tax rate that would make people’s eyes pop when compared to middle income and even relatively wealthy (by normal standards) people who pay considerably higher rates.

That might cause a little problem in any election year. But issues of income inequality and particularly tax policy are right at the top of the political agenda in 2012. And that dictates keeping those tax returns under wraps as long as possible. 

And Mitt's big issue, the plaid shirts, the hokey family stuff, the "unemployed" jibes at campaign stops, all are focused on selling him as an ordinary guy.  His tax return would all but annihilate that illusion, and it would be in a way that Romney couldn't equivocate about:  numbers don't lie (or at least, they sure had better not lie on a tax return for a presidential candidate.)

If America figures out that Mitt paid less of an effective tax rate than Americans who really are middle-class, salt of the earth types, then he's done.  Millionaire Mitt would get squashed in the realm of Occupy Wall Street, Inequalistan and Republicans fighting to empty the pockets of working Americans.  He knows it would be the final flip that he couldn't flop on, and he'd be on the record.

If Mitt was smart, this would have been the perfect Friday to dump this news on, just before a holiday weekend and the Village bound and determined to declare Mitt the winner no matter what happens in Iowa on Tuesday.  As it is, the longer he draws it out, the worse it's going to be when he finally has to do it.