Now, here me out. According to his 2010 return, the only year he's made (almost) completely public, he paid no income taxes. Very techinically, that is a correct statement. He paid no income taxes because he didn't have an income, in the traditional sense.
The stat he used in that, now infamous, video is misleading. It's misleading because it only tells about 1/10th of the story. It's not even a techinically accurate statistic, it's entirely misleading and partially false. Income taxes are different than sales tax, than property taxes, than any other kind of taxes that are applied to taxable gains or interest. See, income tax is only paid by people who have traditional jobs, earn paychecks and get W-2s at the end of the year. 99.9% of people in this country pay some form of tax.
According the the Tax Policy Center, 61% of households who do not owe income taxes are working households.
Only 17% of households pay nothing, either payroll or income taxes. But even this 17% pays sales tax.
The poorest 20% of this country pay about 4% in taxes (income or payroll), their average household is around $18k per year.
The next-to-the-bottom rung in this country (21%-40%) pay about 10% (income or payroll), with incomes averaging between $20k-34k.
That might not be a lot of taxes, but I bet it seems like a lot when your income is only $18k per year. It also seems like a lot when you consider that Mitt only paid 13%.
I know it's a common myth among the Republican party that there is a whole welfare queen state, who mooch off the government, pay nothing and live like kings off their food stamps. The Republicans keep bringing up this phrase, "politics of envy". Of course, they used it to refer to the made up problems that they believe to be "class warfare", that middle America hates rich people or something, it never quite made sense. But I think they hit a grain of truth with that phrase, not in the context, but in the reality. Republicans are driven by envy, but for some completely unexplainable reason, they are envious of the poor. They glamorize the poor lifestyle. It's really perplexing and probably the stupidest thing I've ever come accross. (Disclaimer: my dad is a Republican, who lives in an more "urban" area and is constantly talking about "drug dealers" buying "steak and lobster" with their "food stamps" and driving "Escalades", etc, so I've had this argument more than once and this envious fantasy does exist in Republicans minds)
This is the part that always gets me. So a person is poor, poor enough to not owe any income taxes and receive any money deducted from their income back as a refund. I don't understand why the poorest among us is being demonized. It's really like the right-wing crazies are jealous of their poorness. It's not like poor people just refuse to pay taxes - the tax code is such that they do not owe taxes. So how is it the poor person's fault that the tax codes says they should not owe income taxes? Did these poor people hire lobbists to get these perks? Isn't Mitt Romney that famous said he only pays the exact amount of taxes that is legal required of him? So it's ok for him to only pay what is legal required, but when poor people do it, they're freeloading, lazy moochers?
In a rational world, which most Republicans are not familiar with, the problem is two fold - a poor person does not earn enough to be taxed and the tax code is such that it does not tax (and/or punish) the poor sufficiently enough. These poor people who are being demonized did not choose to be poor. I doubt they chose a low income lifestyle for the sole purpose of getting out of paying taxes. These people do hard, manual labor jobs, that are entirely neccessary in our country.
The taxes that Mitt pays on capital gains, carried interest and all other forms of essentially making money from doing almost nothing - that's not income tax. So Mitt, by his own definition of what is wrong with this country, is a part of the problem.
So, the question that begs to be asked, since Mitt is part of the freeloading, lazy, victimized part of, our society that doesn't nothing, has no "skin in the game",etc, etc, so is Mitt planning on voting for Obama?
