Matt Taibbi: Obama, Not Reid, Should Be Taking on Mitt Romney's Tax Record

Obama, Not Reid, Should Be Taking on Mitt Romney's Tax Record

POSTED: August 9, 9:12 AM ET

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-not-reid-should-be-taking-on-mitt-romneys-tax-record-20120809



The ongoing war between Harry Reid and Mitt Romney is certainly interesting, as battles between congenitally unlikeable politicians go, but to me it misses the point. The Democrats want everyone in the world to know that Mitt Romney won’t release a decades’ worth of tax returns, and they apparently want voters to suspect that he didn’t pay any tax during that time. They're using Harry Reid to spread that message, which makes enough sense politicially, I guess.

But what they should be doing instead is hammering Romney on the missing returns, yes, but focusing even more on the returns he did release. We’ve known for seven months now, for instance, that Romney paid $3 million in federal taxes in 2010 on $21.7 million in taxable revenue, an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent. Which, as most people know, is less than half the rate most people pay on their income tax.

When Romney released these numbers, he said they were "entirely legal and fair," and added, "I’m proud of the fact that I pay a lot of taxes."

The Romney tax returns are a prime example of our increasingly two-tiered bureaucratic system, in which there is one set of rules for poor and middle-class people, and another set of rules for people like Mitt Romney.