Scott Spiegel

Governor Mitt Romney has finally capitulated to the nation’s wealth-haters, releasing his tax records months before primary candidates typically do to quell swelling resentment fueled by Occupy Wall Streeters, left-leaning media, and boobs like Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and John Huntsman.  (Thanks, GOP candidates!)

Of course Romney’s forthrightness isn’t good enough for the left, who now argue that he must release a dozen or perhaps 20 years of tax records, so we can spend the next ten months scrutinizing them for rounding errors and keep the focus off President Obama’s record.

Obama-friendly journalists are suggesting Romney also release information on his complete financial portfolio, his retirement accounts, his trust funds for his wife and children, and sworn affidavits from eyewitnesses that he never cheated at Monopoly.  (When is the media going to demand that Obama release his college transcripts?)

Romney’s tax records showed apoplectic liberals and gullible mainstream media that he paid 14% federal income tax on the $42 million he earned in 2010 and 2011.

Doesn’t sound like a lot?  It’s much higher than the percentage shelled out by the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income taxes, and it’s more than the effective tax rate of 97% of Americans.

Mitt’s tax rate was lower than it otherwise might have been, in part because he lost tens of millions of dollars during the recession and carried those losses over, thus reducing his tax burden in subsequent years.  Our system handsomely rewards smart risk-taking in investment, because it’s just as likely that you’ll lose your shirt as strike it rich.

But the main reason Romney wasn’t taxed at a higher rate is that he wasn’t paying ordinary income tax.  He was paying long-term capital gains taxes, which have been levied at a preferential rate to encourage capital investment since their inception nearly a century ago.  Romney already paid the highest federal rate on the income he earned in years past, then paid again for the profits he made investing that income.

How many Occupy Wall Streeters understand that Mitt Romney paid a 14% tax rate on his long-term capital gains after he had already paid over 30% in federal taxes on the earnings he invested to acquire those gains?

Not to defend Warren Buffett, whose fabled secretary was trotted out as a campaign prop during the 2012 State of the Union address on Monday, but the reason Buffett got away with claiming he paid a lower percentage in taxes than his secretary was that he omitted that he had already paid handsomely in taxes on the income he earned and invested in capital gains.  If Debbie Bosanek ever becomes a celebrity business magnate and gets filthy rich, she’ll be forking it over to the government twice, too.

Lest we forget, all the wealth that Romney’s wise investment choices created will in turn be taxed, and the next generation of investments funded from this wealth will be taxed, and on down the line in a snowballing cycle of tax revenue generation.

The most fascinating aspect of the brouhaha over Romney’s tax returns is that it’s largely Democratic presidents who signed into law such favorable capital gains terms of which he has taken advantage—and of which they now disapprove.

Democratic presidents throughout the 20^th century have certainly been less likely than Republican presidents to cut the marginal federal income tax rate.  But it’s Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, who have foolishly raised capital gains taxes again and again—admittedly often under pressure from overwhelmingly Democratic Congresses.

Richard Nixon raised the maximum capital gains tax rate from 36.5% to 39.875%, before Jimmy Carter slashed it to 28%.  Reagan raised it from 20% at the beginning of his first term to 28%, George H. W. Bush inched it up to 28.93%, and then Bill Clinton hacked it from 29.19% to 21.19%.

This ironic partisan trend wasn’t broken until the presidency of George W. Bush, the first Republican president to lower the maximum capital gains tax since it was instated under Warren Harding in 1921.  Maybe Democratic presidents lowered capital gains taxes to compensate for having raised income taxes.  But Republicans’ embarrassing record on capital gains taxes speaks for itself.

So why didn’t Romney make his tax records available to the public immediately after he was asked?  Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass Obama.

As revealed in his War and Peace-length tax returns, Romney gave 370 times as much to charity in 2011 as Barack and Michelle Obama gave in the four years from 2000 to 2004.  By percentage of income, Romney gave 20 times as much.

Romney gave 1,000 times as much to charity in 2011 as Joe Biden did in the ten years from 1999 to 2009.

Mitt gave so much to charity in 2010 and 2011—$7 million—that it eclipsed the not-insignificant $6 million in federal income taxes he paid.

If liberals refuse to believe that high-income earners like Mitt are the ones who do the bulk of the investing in our economy, foster the largest share of job creation, and shoulder the overwhelming majority of the federal tax burden, can they at least admit that rich people are the ones who keep most charitable organizations afloat?



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In honor of Tax Day 2011 and Democrats’ impeccably timed renewed push to raise taxes on high income earners, behold the following lessons we’ve learned about economics from liberals in recent times:

•    The most innovative and wealth-generating company in the history of the world, Apple Inc., destroys jobs.  So sayeth Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., an admitted iPad owner, who blamed Steve Jobs’ latest invention for taking away employment from textbook manufacturers and paper mills.  In other news, a Democratic Representative from West Virginia excoriated the “automobile” for killing off the horse-and-buggy industry.

•    Cutting $352 million from a proposed $3.7 trillion budget is “the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians.”  This according to D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was fuming over the possibility of a government shutdown two weeks ago.  Given liberals’ complaints about the size of the military industrial complex and the expense of war, this is quite a bargain.  How can we harness this technology of “Miniscule Republican Budget Cuts” to defeat Moammar Kaddafi’s forces in Libya?

•    Not constraining teachers’ unions’ ability to award themselves extravagant pensions and health care packages no one in the private sector has, thereby continuing to bankrupt states by keeping entitlement spending astronomically high, is good for union members.  In contrast, making slight cuts to bloated benefits programs in order to prevent massive layoffs hurts the little guy.  This bit of wisdom comes courtesy of the delusional, demonic mobs who swarmed outside the Wisconsin State Capitol trying to undermine Governor Scott Walker’s implementation of his nefarious campaign promise to balance the state budget.

•    Raising tax rates on job creators and wealth investors leads them to selflessly continue to create jobs and invest wealth at the same rate as before.  This directly contradicts liberals’ caricature of the rich as selfish bastards who hoard profits and refuse to help the economy recover, but try pointing that out to a liberal.  This also contradicts the evidence that every time marginal tax rates have been lowered—under Reagan, Clinton, Bush—tax revenues have increased, and every time they’ve been raised, tax revenues have decreased.

•    Spreading the wealth around is preferable to increasing the wealth for everybody, if the latter means that the gap between high- and low-income earners widens.  See, for example, Senator Barack Obama’s response to Charlie Gibson during a primary debate with Hillary Clinton, in which he responded to irrefutable evidence that cutting capital gains taxes boosts federal revenue with the argument that companies should nonetheless be forced to pay more “for purposes of fairness.”

•    The U.S. doesn’t have a spending problem—it has a revenue problem.  Hat tip to Michael Moore, who recently bellowed that “America is not broke…  The country is awash in wealth and cash…  It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the über-rich.”  Double hat tip to conservative site Iowa Hawk, which deftly and devastatingly refuted Moore’s ludicrous claim.

•    Paying taxes is the highest form of patriotism.  See Clinton-era hack Paul Begala’s editorial explaining why April 15 should be considered “Patriot’s Day.”  Note that the first credential liberals always cite as evidence of their patriotism is not “I vote” or “I support the military” but: “I pay taxes!”  For liberals, there is no greater moral obligation than federally funding cowboy poetry festivals.

•    The amount of federal income taxes Americans pay is “about right.”  This according to a recent Gallup survey in which 43% of Americans approved of current tax rates and 50% thought they were too high—i.e., 43% were left-leaning and 50% were right-leaning.  Much of that 43% no doubt overlapped with the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income tax.

•    The work required to earn a high GPA is completely, utterly different from the work required to earn a high salary.  One… doesn’t involve money, and the other does, or something.  In the above video, the next generation of potential industry titans informs us that forcibly redistributing grade points among university students by taking from those with “excessive GPAs” and giving to the disadvantaged who have to work harder and hold down extra jobs is a terrible idea, but forcibly redistributing dollars among citizens and giving to the disadvantaged who have to work harder and hold down extra jobs is… a wonderful idea!

•    When Democrats cut spending and refuse to raise taxes, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has—i.e., when they abandon their party’s core philosophy and govern like conservatives—they enjoy skyrocketing popularity ratings and set their constituents on a path to financial solvency.

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