I really don’t have a clue why Mitt Romney doesn’t have a good answer for the MSM-fueled Bain and income-tax questions. How hard would it have been for Mitt to say last night when Brian Williams asked if there were any surprises in his tax returns that he released today:
“Yes, Brian. There are some surprises. The biggest one is that I paid every cent I owed in taxes unlike Timothy Geithner, General Electric, Tom Daschle, Al Sharpton, Charlie Rangel, Cindy Sheehan, etc. Should I continue, Brian? Maybe you can ask those who wrote the tax laws I have obeyed what they were thinking when they wrote them, because, to be honest with you, they make no sense.”
Talk about unforced errors. Can anybody answer why Mitt didn’t clean all of this up in the past four years?
But then if you consider the complexity of the tax code and the complexity of Romney's taxes (I'm guessing he's not using the EZ form), it's not implausible that there are some errors along the way, which sets up a nice gotcha moment for the opposition.
I read recently that Fred Wilpon (NY Mets owner) had a tax return the other year that was > 2000 pages. It's a mind-boggling number, and hard to believe that such a thing is going to be error free. I would suspect (I haven't looked at them) that Romney's taxes are on a similar order of magnitude, or at least they are something drastically different from yours and mine.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat would have been a great response, yes, but I don't share the conventional (Conservative) wisdom that he bungled his answer on the issue. I think it (his response to demands that he disclose his returns NOW!) is/was a red herring issue, and I didn't hold it against Romney to more or less reacted with, "I have nothing to hide, but I will not be badgered into doing anything." And I don't say that as a Romney apologist . . . just as a Republican who knows the peril of letting your opponents, who are not acting in good-faith, to dictate your actions on otherwise amoral questions.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhy should he prepare substantive answers? We all know he is the nominee the GOP wants. Best if he stays as vanilla and inoffensive as possible. Just smile. Just try to be charming. No need to confuse the election (and voters) with substance.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow about:
"I made a lot of money. That's what freedom and capitalism are about in this country. I paid a lot of taxes; that's right, I paid mine. Now enough of this irrelevant stuff. Let's talk about freedom and smaller government and how we help the private sector generate the wealth that forms the base for those taxes you want to talk about. How do we get government out of the way of business and opportunity."
If I were Romney, I would simply hold up an unopened ream of paper from Staples and say,
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Brian, here is a ream of paper from Staples, a company Bain helped grow from 1 store to 1,000 and this is not sufficient to print my tax return since it is 547 pages long. The problem is with OUR tax code and not MY tax return."