After being badgered incessantly by Gingrich, Perry, and Santorum, “vulture capitalist” Romney finally released his tax filings. We finally got to see what dirt was being covered up in his returns.
And the dirt was — nothing!
The press sifted through the 500 plus pages of Romney’s 2010 filing (and his projected filing for 2011), desperately looking for something to hit him with, and Romney came out totally clean. The media mission was to find new material that their guy Obama could use to bash Romney, but the mission was an abject failure.
True, the released material shows Romney to be a very rich man. But the filings only confirm what anybody could have found by Google-searching the dude and reading his Wiki entry, to wit, that he is worth around a quarter of a billion bucks. Listen, don’t get me wrong: I would love to have that kind of scratch. But it doesn’t put the man on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list — he’s nowhere as wealthy as such media-darling leftist billionaires as Warren Buffett and George Soros.
Progressives are cheap when it comes to spending their own money to help others. They are generous only with other people’s money.
To be precise, in 2010 Romney earned $21.7 million, of which $12.6 million was capital gains, $3.3 million taxable interest, $4.9 million dividend income, and the remaining million or so money coming from various business gains, refunds, and speaking fees. Romney gave a whopping $3 million to charity — about 14% of his income.
Taxes on cap gains, dividends, and interest rates are a flat 15%, and charitable donations are quite legally deductible — which explains why he “only” paid about $3 million in taxes (about a 14% effective tax rate).
In short, he legitimately minimized his taxes, and paid no more than he was legally required to. This puts him in the same boat as the rest of us, Obama and Biden (and Buffett and Soros) included. I confess that I try to minimize my taxes legally. I never — repeat, never — pay more than the law requires, and I have nowhere near Romney’s tax burden.
The mainstream media was reduced to nitpicking. It turns out, for example, that Romney — whose portfolio is in a blind trust, please note, so invests without his knowledge or control — had small investments in Swiss and Cayman Island accounts. All quite legal if declared to the government — and it was.
Of his generous charitable giving, half of it went to the Mormon church, and the rest to a variety of charities, including one for researching MS (an ailment that afflicts his wife).
His projected 2011 filing, which he has promised to release in April when it is filed, shows similar income, charitable outlays, and tax rate.
There is no doubt that Obama will use as much of this as he can to hammer Romney in the fall, assuming that Romney is the Republican nominee, which I regard as virtually certain. But there is little ammo here.
Indeed, Romney’s lavish charitable giving actually underscores Obama’s cheapness when it comes to charitable giving. Compare the nearly 14% of his income ($3,000,000) that Romney gave, to what the Obamas did: from 2000 through 2004, they gave about 1% to charity (or less than $11,000), and in 2007 they gave 5.7% (or about $240,000). Even more tight-fisted was VP Joe Biden, who averaged a pathetic 0.3% (a truly risible $349) in annual charitable giving in the decade before he became vice president, and not much more since. Last year, Biden gave 1.4% ($5,300) to charity. Truly nothing compared to Romney.
The national average for giving is about 5%.
This illustrates the thesis of Arthur Brook’s estimable Who Really Cares?, a book I reviewed for these pages some time back (March 2009, 43–6): the progressives are cheap when it comes to spending their own money to help others. They are generous only with other people’s money.
Even the 14% tax rate that Romney enjoys is hard to use against him. Remember, the John Kerry household paid 13%, and the Democrats had no problem voting for him as their nominee. And for Obama to push the capital gains and dividend rates back up is for him to risk a major downturn on the stock market, as well as in the lavish support he is getting from his billionaire buddies. That could cost him the election.
In the end, after relentless attacks by Gingrich, Perry, and Santorum, all that has been revealed about Romney is that he legally and ethically earned a large amount of money, paid his taxes, and is a devout member of his church. In short, what is known now is what everybody knew all along.
Given that Obama has few accomplishments he can run on, we can also expect from him what we knew all along. His likely $2 billion reelection campaign (the $1 billion his campaign will have to spend, and the $1 billion that will be spent by groups that support him) will be entirely negative. And it will be as repetitive as it will be negative. It will simply repeat that Romney is rich, rich, rich! And he is white, white, white! And he is Mormon, Mormon, Mormon!
I am weary already.
