Did Mitt Romney pay any federal taxes at all in 2009?

Source: Washington Post

Posted by Ezra Klein on July 17, 2012 at 2:50 pm

On the issue of Mitt Romney’s tax returns, my colleague George Will put it simply: “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

The question is what could be in them that would be so damaging to the Romney campaign. Right now, the most popular theory is that Romney simply didn’t pay any federal taxes at all in 2009. As Joshua Green wrote, ” It’s possible that he suffered a large enough capital loss that, carried forward and coupled with his various offshore tax havens, he wound up paying no U.S. federal taxes at all in 2009.”

But the tax experts I’ve spoken to are skeptical. “Romney had a $4.8 million capital loss carryover coming into 2010,” says Edward Kleinbard, a professor of tax law at the University of Southern California. “So that means no capital gain income in 2009. If you look on the first page , though, he had lots of ordinary income (interest mostly), and dividends, which are taxed at the same rate as capital gains but which cannot be sheltered from tax by capital losses. So presumably he had some positive income tax in 2009.”

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, agrees. “It’s unlikely that his taxable income was zero or even close enough to zero that his credits would zero out his tax liability completely,” he says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/17/did-mitt-romney-pay-any-federal-taxes-at-all-in-2009/

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Terms most "regular" tax-filers seldom use: “loss harvesting,” "unusual tax shelters"