Romney's return also revealed he closed a Swiss bank account in 2010 for political reasons
With numbers like
these, it's no wonder Mitt Romney opposes
the Buffett Rule:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax records on Tuesday indicating he is paying $6.2 million in taxes on a total of $42.5 million in income over the years 2010 and 2011.
Bowing to increasing political pressure to provide more detail about his vast wealth, the former private equity executive released tax returns indicating he and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. They expect to pay a 15.4 percent rate when they file their returns for 2011.
Even though Romney isn't going as far as President Obama—who has released his tax returns back through 2000—or his father, who released twelve years of returns when he ran for president, Romney's returns contain some interesting nuggets beyond his absurdly low effective tax rate:
Romney's holdings include an undisclosed amount in funds based in the Grand Cayman Islands and other overseas entities.
Romney advisers stressed that the holdings in the Caymans - along with those in a Swiss bank account that was closed in 2010 after an investment adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney - were reported on tax returns and were not vehicles to avoid taxes.
They also stressed that Romney, whose holdings are in three blind trusts, makes no decisions as to how his money is invested.
Regardless, the emerging picture was of a man of great means who contributes mightily to charity. The documents showed he and his wife contributed $7 million in charity over the two years, much of it going to his Mormon church. That represents more than 15 percent of the Romneys' income for those years.
The campaign is refusing to release more than the two years that it already has, defending today's document dump as a "fulsome" release. But given that the Swiss bank account was closed to further Romney's presidential ambitions, one wonders what else might be lurking in the documents if one were to go back a number of years. As his dad said when releasing 12 years worth of returns, one year's release could simply be "done for show." What else is out there?
In a way, it's understandable if Romney feels releasing more than two years would represent an invasion of his privacy, but nobody forced him to run for president, and there's no good reason for him to be any less transparent than President Obama.