Mitt Romney

CHART: How Romney's Tax Rate Stacks Up To Recent Presidential Candidates'

Brian Beutler | January 30, 2012, 5:27AM

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann.

When Mitt Romney tries to avoid scrutiny for his exceptionally low effective tax rate by noting that, in absolute terms, he's paying "a lot" in taxes, he won't be fooling most of his political colleagues. It takes a special kind of affluence to reduce one's tax burden so dramatically. And despite their significant wealth most recent Presidential candidates have paid significantly more in taxes as a percentage of their incomes in the year (or two) before their campaign.

The exception is John Kerry. Though Kerry himself had a modest income (for a politician) his wife, Teresa Heinz, comes from great wealth and, like Romney, made millions in investment income in 2003 -- the year she and he both released their tax returns. Together, their effective tax rate was a bit lower than Mitt and Ann Romney paid in 2010.

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Defense Spending

Top Defense Dem: GOP Must Blink First To Avoid Pentagon Cuts

Brian Beutler | January 26, 2012, 11:59AM

Despite a brewing panic among Congressional Republicans (and some Democrats) over automatic, across-the-board defense cuts set to kick in on January 1, 2013, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee says those cuts must stand unless and until Republicans relent on their anti-tax absolutism, and agree on a balanced deficit reduction package that includes higher revenue.

"The purpose of the sequester is to force us to act to avoid the sequester," Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor roundtable. "It's like a nuclear weapon -- it's totally useless; it can't be used except to accomplish some other goal than its use. It's used to deter."

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Carl Levin

Top Dem Offshoring Expert Smells Something Fishy In Romney's Tax Code

Brian Beutler | January 26, 2012, 11:05AM

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) says Mitt Romney will have to make his pre-2010 tax returns available. That may sound like a predictable demand from a partisan Democrat. But it's more than that.

Levin may well know more about tax avoidance strategies than anybody in Congress. In his capacity as the Democrats' top investigator he's has made extensive inquiries into the techniques businesses and individuals use, including overseas havens, to hide their money from the IRS. And what Romney's revealed so far troubles him.

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Taxes

Senate Democrats Plan To Put Republicans On The Wrong Side Of The Middle Class

Brian Beutler | January 25, 2012, 3:11PM

Senate Democrats are preparing an aggressive legislative agenda to complement the vision President Obama outlined in his State of the Union Address. The goal is to test the idea that the public supports an agenda of aggressive federal action on behalf of the middle class, and that Republicans are locked in a pattern of reactionary opposition, even to popular policies.

The push is premised on the notion that the country has turned the corner on the fights over deficits and the size of government, and that keeping issues of equity and opportunity for the middle class at the center of the national debate will redound to Democrats' political benefit, either by breaking the GOP or by putting them on the wrong side of public opinion.

But in an extremely consequential election year, when consensus becomes an endangered species on Capitol Hill, it will take a groundswell of political pressure to force either party to work with the other on a substantive agenda. So expect the Dems to hawk these issues relentlessly.

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Mitt Romney

Three Key Questions Raised By Romney's Tax Revelations

Brian Beutler | January 25, 2012, 5:44AM

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney's campaign has tried desperately to put a lid back on the can of worms that burst open weeks ago when the one-time GOP presidential front runner declined to release any of his tax returns.

But by actually releasing his 2010 return, and an estimation of his 2011 return, camp Romney has provided reporters with some, but not all, of the answers they're looking for as they try to paint a complete picture of the finances of one of the wealthiest candidates for President in U.S. history.

Romney's revelations confirm that his effective tax rates in the past couple years have been as low or lower than those of workers with truly modest means. They also confirm that he's availed himself of truly complex tax strategies designed to boil his liability down to the lowest level allowed by the country's heavily rigged, labyrinthine tax code. And we know, too, that these are things Romney didn't want voters to know -- at least not yet.

But they raise a series of new questions that will likely require Romney to disclose several years' worth of additional tax returns if he wants to answer them satisfactorily. Here are three big ones that touch generally on the theme of Romney's efforts to reduce his tax burden by taking advantage of areas of the law that simply aren't available to most people.

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State Of The Union

State Of The Union: Obama's Point-By-Point Romney Refutation

Brian Beutler | January 24, 2012, 10:55PM

President Barack Obama

President Obama's State of the Union address was premised on two political bets: that there's a broad national appetite, spanning conservative and liberal ideologies, for certain populist reforms; and that Republicans in Congress are too deeply committed to opposing his agenda to back those reforms along side him.

His speech was peppered with the sorts of proposals that play well across the country. But after executing a three year plan of partisan opposition to his full agenda, Republicans can't possibly support them -- and that puts them on the steep side of an election Obama is framing while Republican presidential hopefuls tear each other down.

It was also sharp-elbowed. It read in a way as a series of critiques of the GOP's most prominent rhetorical attacks on Democratic priorities, and as a piecemeal rebuttal of the talking points his most likely general election opponent Mitt Romney has levied against him in a bid to shore up support among Republican base voters.

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Mitt Romney

Romney Camp Revelations Leave Key Tax Questions Unanswered

Brian Beutler | January 24, 2012, 10:31AM

Mitt Romney

On a conference call with the media Tuesday morning several of Mitt Romney's political and financial aides tried to suck the life out of the undying story of Romney's tax liability, walking reporters through hundreds of pages of his family's tax returns.

As he acknowledged several days ago, Romney pays a very low effective tax rate given his enormous income and extraordinary wealth. His effective rate is about the same as that of a wage earner making $40,000 a year, barely hanging on in the broader middle class.

For the most part, Romney's aides deftly addressed lingering controversies about his returns. Many of these stem from the complicated nature of the strategies they use to keep his liability down, all of which constitute very new terrain for political reporters. But a couple of things stuck out.

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Eric Cantor

Cantor: Health Care And Tax Fights Will Be Decided By The Election

Brian Beutler | January 23, 2012, 3:51PM

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) urges the Senate to vote on the house-passed jobs bill during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. on October 27, 2011.

At a briefing with a handful of reporters in his Capitol suite Monday afternoon, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor outlined the coming year on Capitol Hill -- one he said would be marked by increased oversight of the Obama administration; an ongoing debate between the parties about how best to grow the economy; and what he called a bipartisan effort to prevent automatic cuts to defense spending from kicking in at the end of the year.

But the two issues that have most divided the parties since President Obama took office -- the two most consequential pieces of the budget and the U.S. economy -- will most likely be decided by the election.

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Rick Santorum

CHART: Santorum Calls For Tiny (Huge!) Tax Cuts For The Poor (Rich)

Brian Beutler | January 19, 2012, 3:50PM

The Tax Policy Center in DC has released numbers Rick Santorum's tax plan -- the latest, and perhaps final, in a series of analyses of the leading GOP contenders' tax plans.

It's a variation on the theme underlying all of the Republicans' tax proposals -- its impact on the middle class is trivial compared to the massive tax cut it proposes for the wealthiest Americans.

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Mitt Romney

Finding The Real Deal On Romney's Offshore Investments

Brian Beutler | January 19, 2012, 2:59PM

Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann.

On Tuesday, Mitt Romney finally acknowledged what we've long suspected: that, despite earning millions of dollars a year, his tax rate is approximately 15 percent -- the same as it would be if he were a teacher earning $50,000 a year.

The disclosure touched off a flurry of news stories -- some about the rigged nature of the U.S. tax code, most about how this fact would play in the primary and general elections. Then on Wednesday ABC News broke another story. Romney, it turns out, has a lot of money invested in offshore funds -- the sort of funds you used to hear about years ago when wealthy people, foreign investors, private pensions and others would invest and shelter their money.

The timing of the ABC story couldn't have been better for those hoping to create a hazy sense that Romney's some kind of tax avoider. But they're largely two different things.

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Henry Waxman

Top Democrat Says GOP Will Have To Budge Big Time in Payroll Tax Fight

Brian Beutler | January 18, 2012, 9:51AM

A key Democrat tasked with helping to negotiate a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, unemployment benefits, and Medicare physician reimbursements says Republicans will have to move significantly off their December demands or all three will lapse.

"We want to extend the middle class tax cut, we want to extend unemployment insurance, and we want to keep our promise to Medicare beneficiaries that we're going to pay for their doctors, so they can have access to their physicians," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) told me in a brief interview off the House floor Tuesday. "But I'm not going to support something to pay for that by cutting Medicare or cutting the middle class. We can reach an agreement on these things, but the Republicans are going to have to move."

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Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett: I'll Pay Up If Republicans Do The Same

David Taintor | January 11, 2012, 5:45PM

It has been a few months since billionaire Warren Buffett called on President Obama to "stop coddling the super-rich" and raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

His "Buffett Rule" sparked some backlash, especially from Republicans, who suggested that Buffett should cut the U.S. government a check if he's so eager to pay his fair share of the nation's debts. Well, Buffett tells TIME magazine that he's willing to do just that. He's willing to match one-for-one any donation by a Republican member of Congress -- except for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, he gets three for one.

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Mitt Romney

CHART: Romney Plan Raises Taxes On Lower-Middle Class, Cuts Taxes On Wealthy

Brian Beutler | January 5, 2012, 3:31PM

Mitt Romney's tax plan is more complex than those of his current and erstwhile primary competitors. But in broad effect it accomplishes the conservative goal of dramatically lowering taxes on the wealthy at the expense of the lower and middle classes.

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center crunched the numbers -- part of a series of analyses the group has done of the GOP candidates' tax proposals -- and found that the plan constitutes a major tax cut for wealthy Americans. But compared to today's rates, Romney proposes effective tax increases for people making less than $40,000.

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Mitt Romney

Here's What Romney's Unreleased Tax Returns Almost Certainly Hide

Brian Beutler | January 5, 2012, 5:32AM

Mitt Romney still says he's unlikely to publicly release his tax information, even if he clinches the Republican presidential nomination, and Democrats have a pretty good idea why.

Romney is a privileged poster child for the "Buffett Rule" -- President Obama's principle that the tax code should make it impossible for a person of great wealth to pay a lower share of their income in taxes than ordinary people. The DNC knows it, policy wonks know it, Romney certainly knows it. But the reasons why are technical and illustrate just how different Romney is from the vast majority of Americans who will cast votes for him -- in either the GOP primary or the general election.

One tax expert told TPM of "fairly sophisticated tax strategies" that would be "not available to ordinary tax payers." A technique that puts you in a position that's "like having an unlimited 401k account" sounds very attractive. But maybe not if you're running for office, for Pete's sake.

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