Willard dumps a phony-baloney 2011 tax return on us, and a 20-year tax fairy tale, and expects us to thank him

"It’s time for Mitt Romney to come clean about both his tax returns and plans to increase taxes on the middle class while slashing them even further for the wealthiest Americans."

-- from ThinkProgress's "10 Questions:
More Questions Than Answers About Romney & Taxes"

by Ken

I was fit to spit when Willard Inc. dumped his brand-new 2011 tax return -- you know, the one with the strange label like it's provisional or something? -- into the legendary Friday news dump. Not so much because of the trick he was trying to use but because indications were that the sleazy slimebag (and potential creepy crook) might get away with it.

The worst sign was that all over there were headlines about Willard "finally" releasing his much-argued-about "tax returns." That's right, returns, plural. Unbelievable! Have the infotainment noozers already forgotten that the returns we were all fighting over were those preceding the 2010 one of which Willard's People produced an only-partial release. The shining example, of course, was Willard's father, George Romney, who made public a dozen years' worth of returns when he was running for president. As for the 2011 return, was it ever imagined that the slimebag would dare not release it? If and when he got around to filing it, that is. I suppose we're supposed to be grateful that he didn't slide it under our door at 11:59pm on October 15, his filing deadline. Of course then it might have commanded more serious media attention.

Since Friday's dump, I haven't been hearing a lot about Willard's taxes, which hold the possibility of telling us some of the hard truths about who this person is, personally and professionally. As our colleagues in the ThinkProgress War Room report in a Progress Report called "10 Questions: More Questions Than Answers About Romney & Taxes":

On Friday, Mitt Romney belatedly released just a single additional tax return -- his 2011 filing -- and a cryptic summary of the previous two decades. The summary featured no details about any individual year. And as for the 2011 return, it was cooked to produce a higher tax rate -- and more favorable headlines -- for Romney, calling into question what else in this and other returns was manipulated to produce a more favorable appearance.

Since the TP War Room people have gone to the trouble of formulating ten questions that come to their minds in the wake of Friday's dump, I think we should hear them out. (Note: There are lots o' links onsite.)

1. After the election, when the subject of your tax returns is outside of the public glare, will you file an amended tax return to claim your full deduction of charitable contributions? Was the tax rate you reported for other years similarly manipulated?

2. Why was your 2011 income $7 million lower than you estimated it to be in January? How does someone overestimate their income by $7 million?

3. Financial disclosures show that you have as much as $82 million in your tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account, despite the fact that tax rules limited contributions into such accounts to $30,000 per year. Did you lowball the value of the assets you put into your IRA, as tax experts suspect? And did you do the same with gifts into your sons’ trusts?

4. What was the purpose of your Swiss bank account and the myriad offshore entities shown on your return, based in countries like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, if not to avoid taxes?

5. Can you explain what one tax expert has called a “mysterious one-time infusion of foreign tax credits” in 2008?

6. You have not disclosed any foreign bank account reports (FBARs). Did you file all FBARs on all of your offshore accounts with the Treasury Department by the legal deadlines each year?
7. You claim to have paid an average tax rate of 20 percent over the last 20 years based on a flawed calculation. What was your real tax rate?

8. Your 14 percent tax rate –- not to mention the approximately 10 percent tax rate you would have paid had you not inflated it — is less than what many middle-class Americans pay. And you paid just 0.2% of your income in payroll taxes, while most Americans pay about 15%. Do you think that is fair?

9. Your tax returns show that the Marriott Corporation paid you $260,390 in directors’ fees in 2011. When you were the company’s audit committee chair in the 1990s, were you aware that the company was abusing a notorious illegal tax shelter?

10. You say you’ve made a “commitment to the public” that your tax rate should not be below 13 percent. If you believe that the richest Americans shouldn’t be paying an exceptionally low tax rate, why don’t you support President Obama’s “Buffett Rule”?

The Progress Report authors add:

In fairness, Romney actually did answer question number eight during a 60 Minutes interview that aired last night. Romney argued that it is indeed “fair” for him to pay a lower tax rate on millions in investment income than a middle class worker pays on $50,000 in wages:

PELLEY: Now, you made on your investments, personally, about $20 million last year. And you paid 14 percent in federal taxes. That’s the capital gains rate. Is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 and paid a higher rate than you did?
WILLARD: It is a low rate. And one of the reasons why the capital gains tax rate is lower is because capital has already been taxed once at the corporate level, as high as 35 percent.
PELLEY: So you think it is fair?
WILLARD: Yeah, I think it’s the right way to encourage economic growth, to get people to invest, to start businesses, to put people to work.

Not only does none other than Ronald Reagan disagree with Romney, but his economic argument is also wrong. The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy ushered in the weakest job growth in decades. Lower taxes on the wealthy do not lead to job growth. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.

BOTTOM LINE: It’s time for Mitt Romney to come clean about both his tax returns and plans to increase taxes on the middle class while slashing them even further for the wealthiest Americans.

ONE FURTHER THOUGHT ABOUT WILLARD'S RETURNS

While the Great Tax-Return Stonewall was still a major news topic, a friend asked me if he couldn't produce doctored versions of the returns. I scoffed. These would be, after all, mere copies of filed returns. Who would dare misrepresent them? Let's come back to that question in a moment, noting first that the fresh-from-the-accountants 2011 return is the first one crafted during Willard's latest presidential candidacy, and as such seems to me to be every bit as much a campaign document as a financial one. Nevertheless, even Willard's People must understand that there are limits to how much imagination can be applied to the manufacture of a tax return.

Still, it occurs to me that Willard's governing principle is that anything you can get away with is OK, and you can get away with anything that nobody forcibly prevents you from getting away with. So he doesn't have to release any pre-2010 returns except under the influence of a loaded gun or an unsquashable subpoena, and if you think you can make him, well, give it your best shot.

Similarly, if he decides to release phonied-up returns, who's going to stop him. The IRS won't get involved, will it? After all, aren't they the sacred guarantors of tax-return confidentiality? Presumably there's kind of check on a publicly released alleged tax return, but in this guy's case I'm not sure I trust it. My fallback position is: I don't trust any alleged return that comes from Willard's People without independent corroboration. OK, call me skeptical.

#