Romney explains to voters why he should pay lower taxes than they do (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Mitt Romney calls himself
"unemployed" on the campaign trail, but his income last year was at least $6.6 million and as much as $40.1 million. If he'd earned that income at a regular job, most of that income would have been taxed at a rate of 35%, but
according to reporting by TIME's Michael Scherer, most of Romney's income came from investments, allowing Romney to pay a far lower tax rate than most Americans:
Calculating the Romneys’ exact tax burden is not possible from the public records because of a number of factors, like the amount of money that Romney deducted from his taxes and the length of time that he owned investments, are unknown. But ballpark estimates are possible. Assuming that Romney declared roughly the same number of deductions as others in his income level and that his dividend and capital gains income qualified for the 15% bracket, Romney would have paid roughly 14% of his gross income in taxes to the federal government in 2010 according to Bob McIntyre, who crafts tax policy at the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice.
Why is this important?
Should Romney win the Republican nomination, he will face substantial pressure to release his own tax returns. Usually such disclosures are little more than formality, but in Romney’s case, it would land him in the middle of one of the biggest policy debates of this election season.
That debate, of course, is the Buffett Rule, which Mitt Romney compares to theft:
On the campaign trail, Romney has defended the 15% tax rate on capital gains, which is set to expire in the coming years. “The President’s party want to take from some and give to others,” Romney said in a recent debate. “That isn’t the way to lift America.”
But no matter what Mitt Romney says, most Americans think it's simply a matter of fairness that guys like him should pay at least as much in taxes as regular folks. It's not a controversial thing — even Ronald Reagan said millionaires should pay more than bus drivers.
The fact that all of the Republican candidates disagree with that idea will be a big problem for the G.O.P. ticket in 2012 — and the fact that Mitt Romney personally has millions of dollars riding on the outcome of the debate puts him in an even tougher spot.