Tax Return Of The King

Mitt Romney's running out of support for refusing to release his tax returns from the Bain years.  Over a dozen major conservative figures and politicians are calling for him to rip the bandages off and take the pain now, but it's become painfully clear that the returns are so awful otherwise this would have been done years ago when he ran for Governor.  He got away with that back then.  Today, not so much.

Ezra Klein argues the returns most likely show that Romney's tax gymnastics and offshore shell account games meant he paid little to no federal taxes in those years.

For what it’s worth — and, since I haven’t see Romney’s 2009 tax return, it’s not worth much — my guess is he paid some federal taxes in 2009. The sort of tax sheltering he would have needed to get to zero would be quasi-suicidal for a presidential aspirant. But his effective federal tax rate may only have been 3 or 4 or 5 percent, which would be nearly as bad as zero. Add in a couple of shelters that Romney fears would look particularly bad, and it’s probably enough to persuade him that enduring a bit of bad press for tax decisions people think he might have made is preferable to a media feeding frenzy over tax decisions he definitely made.

The question none of this answers is why Romney didn’t clean up his taxes in 2008 and 2009. But it’s always worth remembering that the people running for office are human beings who procrastinate and make bad decisions and get distracted by other things. And given that Romney moves in a world where aggressive tax planning is the norm rather than the exception, he might simply have failed to recognize what a priority simplifying his taxes really was. My hunch is that the person spending the most time wondering why Romney didn’t get his taxes in order in 2008 is…Mitt Romney.

And yes, considering how much damage he's taken from his 14% effective tax rate for last year,  if that number is something like 4% at the depths of the worst recession in generations, he's a goner and he knows it.  Ironically conservatives like George Will and the editors of National Review really are giving him good advice:  release the returns, take your lumps and ride it out.

Either way however, the Obama administration is winning this fight.  Either Mitt paid almost nothing in taxes, or they can say he's hiding something for the next 3.5 months.



Which makes me think there might even be something worse in there that happened after the McCain vetting in 2008.