As we know, the FEC already requires candidates to disclose their finances, as well as quarterly campaign financial reports. Some of our wealthier candidates - on the left as well as on the right - seem to think that this is sufficient; that a demand to see tax returns is a "distraction", a "smokescreen" - that "voters don't care about what I pay in taxes".
There are quite a few candidates who are being challenged to do so, in addition to Mr. R-money himself. But are these demands just campaign stunts, as those resistors would like us to believe, or do we really have an interest in knowing what our elected officials file with the IRS?
Follow me beyond the fold....
President Obama isn't alone in calling on Romney to release his taxes. In races across the country, candidates are challenging their opponents to do the same. Here are just a few:
Baltimore - MD-6
Garagiola releases tax returns, challenges others to follow
Connecticut - US Senate
Murphy kicks off work week with tax return release
San Diego - CA-52
Saldana reissues challenge to congressional candidates to make taxes public
Springfield - IL-12
Candidate raising stakes in tax-return duel for Illinois' 12th congressional race
The big message for dems, especially since Occupy and the 99%'ers took hold, is that the economy has been rigged for the 1%, so it is very easy to be tempted to expose these candidates as culpable "members of the 1%" and leave it at that.
However, there is a lot more to it. Not only are we interested in knowing what tax rate they pay, to "condemn" them personally for paying a lower rate, but we also have an interest in exposing the growing economic injustice in what used to be a progressive tax rate structure. We can't force random members of the 1% to show us their taxes (Buffett being a bold exception) so seeing the taxes of 1%'ers who are running for office is really our only chance to know what these folks are really paying, and how incredibly unfair it is.
Greg Sargent says it well:
...[Romney] personally symbolizes virtually the entire 2012 Democratic message. He is the walking embodiment of everything Dems allege is wrong with our system and the ways it’s rigged in favor of the wealthy and against the middle class.
But, focusing on one presidential candidate as the sole symbol of everything that is wrong with our economy is weak; it's too easy for them to argue that we are trying to single him out and vilify him simply for being rich - the "oh we're so jealous of you" defense. Therefore, it's critical that we point out the injustice wherever we see it.
67% of US senators and over 40% of congressional representatives are millionaires; that is astonishing - and we wonder why we have the problems that we do. While being a millionaire shouldn't preclude anyone from running for office, we definitely need to know who they are. But again, our goal with the tax challenge isn't solely to expose rich people; the FEC filings are enough to disclose that.
One of the things we should be looking for is how are they paying such low tax rates? What are the loopholes, the tax shelters, the deductions that are afforded to them in order to reduce their rate to truly offensive lows? We need to know; we need to know what needs to be reformed, and who has been behind all these changes in the past thirty years that have so skewed the prosperity in this country away from the vast majority of us. The bottom line is accountability.
In addition, when you are dealing with vast amounts of wealth on the levels of Romney or San Diego CA52 candidate Scott Peters, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the required FEC financial disclosures simply are not detailed enough. For example, Peters is worth almost $300M (we can't determine the exact number from the documents), but his disclosure form is only 16 pages. If I can read it and understand it, then that tells me that there is a lot missing.
There is a helluva lot more information contained in the documents that are filed with the IRS than there is in the FEC filings. To further illustrate, how long did it take after Romney released his 2010 taxes to find a whole ton of discrepancies with his FEC filing? Not long.
In 48 accounts from Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded in Boston, Romney declined on his financial disclosure forms to identify the underlying assets, including his holdings in a company that moved U.S. jobs to China and a California firm once owned by Bain that filed for bankruptcy years ago and laid off more than 1,000 workers.
Romney's own father felt that it was important for a candidate not only to release their taxes, but even one year wasn't enough:
As Gov. George Romney — Mitt Romney’s father— said when he released 12 years of his taxes in 1968, “One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.”
Romney released 23 years of tax returns to John McCain's campaign, and something in there caused his campaign to turn tail and run in such panic that they got all star-bursty on political train wreck Sarah Palin. It's no surprise he's not eager to release them.
So while releasing tax returns is not an FEC requirement, in this era of the worst wealth inequality that we have seen in almost 100 years it is important and necessary. We need to know where the economic interests lie of those who are supposed to represent us in Washington. We need to know if they are being honest about where their money comes from, and where their money is.
We need to better understand their motivations for the policies that they support, so we can better determine what policies are truly in the public's best interest.