Quick glance at Mitt Romney's return...
Mitt's over-200-page return shows some rather interesting things...
First, the guy is seriously rich--his taxable income for tax year 2010 after all his deductions is over $17 million. His adjusted gross income is over $23 million. We kinda suspected that, but when it's in black and white...
Next: quite a few of the pages in this book are either Form 1116 (Foreign Tax Credit), Form 8621 (return by a shareholder of a passive foreign investment company) Form 8886 (Reportable Transaction Disclosure Statement) or supplements to schedules, which are generated by his accountant and aren't on an IRS form.
Third: strangely enough, for all the supposed investment acumen Mitt Romney possesses, he's got a habit of hooking up with really bad-performing foreign investment vehicles. A lot of his 8621s show income of less than $100--there's one that made him $11 in 2010. I may be cynical, but Mitt Romney has more change in his couch cushions than some of these investments made him; there is SOMETHING going on that keeps him in an investment that made him eleven bucks in 2010, and it's probably not on the up-and-up.
Now for the taxes he paid.
In Tax Year 2010, he owed the government $3,009,766 according to the tax code in place at the time...or 13.9 percent of his total income. Mitt actually sent in more than this with his request for extension of time to file, plus he'd been making estimated income tax payments over the year, so he received a tax refund of over $1.6 million. (And that's the scary part of this whole return: in tax year 2010, approximately 140,000 of the approximate 138 million taxpayers who filed an individual income tax return made more money than Mitt Romney got back on his taxes.)
If Mitt Romney's income would have been taxable at the 35 percent "ordinary income" rate, he would have owed $5,992,023.
And you know how I've said The Filthy Rich don't want a flat tax because it would cause their taxes to go up? At the 26 percent "flat tax" rate--remember, "flat tax" is on ALL income above a number that amounts to a rounding error when you make 23 million friggin' dollars a year--Mitt would have owed the government $5,631,949.
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