Talking about Mitt Romney’s tax returns this morning, top Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod criticized Romney for having paid more than he needed to in taxes.
“And at the end of the week, we saw him manipulating his own tax returns to try and plump up his portion of taxes to 14 percent . . . two months ago, on your own air, he said that anybody who didn’t take the deductions they were owed wasn’t qualified to be president,” Axelrod said on ABC’s This Week. “Well, I guess he’s not qualified because that’s exactly what he did last week to try and get his number up from 9 or 10 percent to 14 percent.”
The reason Romney would have paid a lower tax rate is because he donated nearly 30 percent of his income in 2011 to charity, qualifying him for significant deductions.
Axelrod also criticized Romney for his remarks about 47 percent of the country, saying Romney’s remarks were “slandering 47 percent of America, saying they were hooked on dependency, didn’t pay their taxes.” He also argued that Romney hadn’t offered enough details about how he would his tax cuts and proposed defense spending would be paid for, saying Romney would “either going to explode the deficit, sock it to the middle class, or both.”
UPDATE: Video, via Eliana Johnson: