In Forbes: 13% of What Mr. Romney?
By Peter J Reilly, Contributor
Mitt Romney has kicked my BS detector into high gear. I’ve notice that when people either want to dramatize raw numbers or avoid talking about them, they shift to percentages. Like the time my boss told me that I got a higher percentage raise than he did. Romney has been accused of paying no income taxes for an unspecified ten year period. He responds by indicating that he looked back at his returns and notes that he paid at least 13% and last year he paid 13.6%. Now instead of going to that extra step of computing a fraction, why didn’t he just tell us what the numerators and the denominators were. We have a copy of his 2010 return and a draft copy of his extended 2011 return.
The 2010 return has total federal income tax net of credits on Line 55 of $2,976,345 which is 13.7% of his adjusted gross income of $21,646,507 on Line 38. Since he was a little vague about the 13.6% – “I think the most recent year is 13.6 or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year.”, those are likely the numbers he is referring to. Since his gross income includes nearly $16,000,000 in capital gains and qualified dividends that is about what you would expect. On the draft 2011 return Line 55 is $3,213,051 while Line 38 is $20,901,075 which makes for 15.4%. The higher percentage is accounted for by there being less in the way of capital gains and qualified dividends.
You have to page a little further in the 2010 return to find another really interesting number, $4,844,089, Line 14 on Schedule D – Long Term Capital Loss Carryover. This means that Mr. Romney did not have capital gains in 2008. So if he had a tax liability for 2008 it was an even higher percentage of his adjusted gross income. Most likely though it was a much lower adjusted gross income and a much lower tax.
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If Romney did participate in tax shelters that are now considered sketchy but were then blessed by prestigious national firms, I don’t think it says anything about him that we don’t already know. It just annoys me when people throw out percentages when the actual numbers are available.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2012/08/17/13-of-what-mr-romney/
