Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney fought back on Friday against Democratic charges he paid no taxes in some years, releasing a letter from his accountants saying he paid an effective federal tax rate of at least 13.6 percent annually over 20 years.Seriously, there is something really hinky about his tax returns that Mitt is desperately trying to hide.
Despite heavy political pressure, Romney stood firm in refusing to make those returns public, but followed through on an earlier promise to release his 2011 return. It showed he paid $1.9 million in taxes on more than $13 million in income - an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent.
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Romney has refused to release returns from his years as head of Bain Capital, a private equity fund that Democratic critics have charged plundered companies and cut jobs in a quest for profits. Romney has an estimated net worth between $190 million and $250 million.
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The Romney campaign published a statement on Friday from former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Fred Goldberg, who declared the returns "reflect the complexity of our laws and the types of investment activity that I would anticipate for persons in their circumstances."
Goldberg said, "In my judgment, they have fully satisfied their responsibilities as taxpayers."
The letter from accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers said the average of Romney's annual effective federal personal income tax rate during the 20-year period up to 2009 was 20.2 percent, and he and his wife, Ann, had a charitable deduction rate of 13.45 percent.
BTW, if you want to run the numbers, I guarantee that he paid only about $10K in social security and medicare taxes, which would be less than 1%.
Ordinary mortals who earn less than about $100K pay about 7½% on every penny for social security and medicare, and that's before the stuff that he squirreled away in his (now closed) Swiss bank account.
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