Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax return — and a summary of his filings between 1990 and 2009 — are now public, and they give America all it needs to know about where he and Barack Obama stand on wealth redistribution.
Obama believes in giving — but to Washington, with the take to be filtered through, and diminished by, the bureaucracy.
Romney believes in a far more personal approach.
Does he ever.
Turns out Romney and wife Ann donated a generous $4,072,772 to charity last year. That works out to 30 percent of their gross income of $13,696,951.
And going back to 1990, they’ve given an average of 13.45 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity.
So much for Team Obama’s canard that heartless fat cat Romney “doesn’t care about the poor.”
As for the Obamas, their charitable deductions have gone up only in recent years — averaging about 5.5 percent between 2005 and 2008, when he was planning a presidential run. But between 2000 and 2004, before he became nationally prominent, they gave between 0.4 and 1.4 percent.
And the Romneys give three times as much to charity in an average single
day than Vice President Joe Biden and his wife did in an entire
decade; the Bidens’ charitable giving amounts to about one-quarter of 1 percent of their income.
Moreover, the Romneys also paid nearly $2 million in taxes last year, for an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent.
And contrary to Senate Majority Leader Hary Reid’s base lie that “they haven’t paid taxes for 10 years,” the Romneys paid both state and federal taxes every year at an average annual effective rate of 20.20 percent — double the national average.
It also turns out that the Romneys claimed only about 55 percent of their actual giving as a charitable deduction.
Which means they actually paid more taxes than they were legally required to.
But wait — last July, Romney said that “if I had paid more [taxes] than are legally due, I don’t think I’d be qualified to become president.”
By which he meant that “people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires.”
Well, it turns out he didn’t do that — he went beyond what the law requires.
Which in some corners of the Twitterverse yesterday was cited as proof that Mitt Romney simply can’t be trusted in the White House.
So there you have it: Mitt Romney doesn’t cheat on his taxes, for sure.
But unlike people like Warren Buffett and Bill Clinton — who constantly complain that they should be paying more taxes than they’re legally required to — Mitt Romney actually does pay more.
Plus, as noted, he gives a lot away.
So much for Romney’s income-tax issue.