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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Tax day for Romney comes too late

By Charles Pierce
Esquire
readersupportednews.org

Okay, we all know he's had a very tough week, but how the hell is this stuff supposed to help?

Or, conversely, why the hell didn't they release this stuff six months ago?

That Willard Romney is G.I. Luvmoney, and that the Luvmoney clan generally finds eight bazillion ways around the U.S. tax code, was established long ago. Therefore, that he paid an effective tax rate that was lower than that of, say, the average firefighter, is a surprise to absolutely nobody.

If he'd have released the 2011 return in the middle of the Republican primaries, it would have been a story at most for a couple of days. None of those other buffoons had either the credibility, or the intellectual firepower, truly to make an issue out of it for longer than that.

Now, though, the Romney campaign puts this stuff out in the middle of an ongoing barrage of ridicule based on the stand-up act he did down in Boca and, instead of simply being a minor dust-up in his inexorable march to the nomination, it's another brick in the wall, especially since he and his party seem to be arguing sub rosa that very poor people aren't kicking in their fair share.

Now, smarter people than me are going to pick through the 2011 return, pointing out all the little ways that smart rich people can game the system, and all that information is going to come out, not in the context of an ongoing clown show, but as further reinforcement of everything that's causing virtually the entire political system to cough up a hairball at the mention of your candidate's name.

There's been more than a little speculation that Willard already has checked out of this whole running-for-president business. (Those of us in the Commonwealth — God save it! — can testify that his interest in matters political can wane pretty quickly.) And there's more than a little hilarity being had on the Intertoobz over the fact that the people running the Romney campaign received some pretty handsome incompetence bonuses.

But this little exercise, at 3 p.m. on a Friday, makes me wonder if some people working for this campaign haven't bet on the president and teased the Over. They spent the entire campaign handling the issue of Romney's tax returns badly. And then, at exactly the wrong moment in the history of the campaign — at exactly the perfectly wrong moment in the history of the campaign — they toss a dead fish out there as an obvious distraction, but a distraction that begs to be picked apart and the bones used to beat their candidate over the head a little more.

I'm not kidding. Jack Molinas went to prison for arranging things this way.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know about you, but I didn't do my own tax return until last month. Many complicated tax returns are done on extensions, and if you have investments, those K-1's may have come out under extensions too.

K-1's are due September 15. It is now a week later.

Is it not entirely possible that he released his 2011 tax returns AS SOON AS HE WAS ABLE TO, because he obviously couldn't release it until AFTER it had been prepared?

Oh, no, that can't be it. Because that would rob you of all the intrigue and speculation about WHY he chose THIS MOMENT to release what everyone has been clamoring for.


Everyone whines because he didn't release a very PERSONAL document (have you posted YOUR returns anywhere lately?) and now that he releases it, that's not good enough for you.

You can pick it apart all you want, but those loopholes were put there BY CONGRESS to encourage certain actions on the part of taxpayers. Why shouldn't he use them to his advantage?

Instead of complaining that the loopholes benefit the people who have the money to spend in ways to accomplish what Congress intended by creating the loopholes, why aren't you lobbying to just eliminate the loopholes, along with whatever societal benefits were intended to accrue from them?

Whine, whine, whine. Some people are never happy unless they have something to complain about.

It's like the birthers whining about Obama's birth certificate and when he finally says, "Good grief, here it is" that wasn't good enough either. Now they pick it apart in a desperate (and failed) attempt to prove it was a forgery.

CAN'T WE CAMPAIGN ON THE ISSUES, AND WITH FACTS, INSTEAD OF LIES AND INNUENDO AND SUSPICION?

Instead of saying, "Thank you, Mr. Romney, now we can clearly see that you haven't broken any tax laws and you paid X% of your income in taxes" you're going to whine about the TIMING of the release.

Anonymous said...

Until the author posts his 2011 return and shows that he too paid over a million dollars in taxes and over four million dollars in donations, I do not see where he has room to gripe.
I notice that he conveniently failed to mention either of the above two numbers about Romney's return.