On Taxes

also the president is the only one who had a mortgage interest deduction. look i don't care what they made; the question is did they pay their fair share? romney appears to have not broken any laws, but he certainly did not pay his fair share and the capital gains tax rate is to blame. why should honest labor be taxed differently than money from investments? there are no analytical answers possible. it's a philosophical question.

both the president and romney are very generous men. newt appears to be a grinch only by comparison.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote:also the president is the only one who had a mortgage interest deduction. look i don't care what they made; the question is did they pay their fair share? romney appears to have not broken any laws, but he certainly did not pay his fair share and the capital gains tax rate is to blame. why should honest labor be taxed differently than money from investments? there are no analytical answers possible. it's a philosophical question.

You must have read David Brooks' piece:
The Wealth Issue


By DAVID BROOKS








Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney’s character formed by his
wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted
by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a
grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and
business). He built a business. He’s persevered year after year, amid
defeat after defeat, to build a political career.

Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his
tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with
striving immigrants, not rich scions.

Where did this persistence come from? It’s plausible to think that it
came from his family history. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once
observed that it takes several generations to make a career. Interests,
habits and lore accrue in families and shape those born into them.


The Romney family history, which is nicely described in “The Real
Romney” by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, is a story of tenacious
work, setbacks and recovery. People who analyze how Mormonism may have
shaped Romney generally look to theology. But the Mormon history, the
exodus, matters most.

Mitt Romney’s great-great-grandfather Miles was a member of the church
in Nauvoo, Ill., and spent years building a temple there. Even after
Joseph Smith was killed by a mob and most of the Mormons fled, Miles
stayed to finish his temple.

Then, in 1844, as the great work was being completed, mobs burned it to
the ground and forced Miles and his family to head West. Most Mormons
made the trek to Salt Lake City, but the Romneys could not afford an ox
cart. They were part of a small, malnourished band that took four years
of struggle to make it the 1,300 miles west.

Mitt’s great-grandfather, also Miles, made the trek starting at age 7.
He was married in 1862, but a month after his marriage Brigham Young
told him to leave his wife, Hannah, and become a missionary for three
years in Britain. Hannah supported herself by taking in other people’s
washing.

Miles returned in 1867 and bought a two-room house. Young commanded him
to take another wife, and Hannah had to prepare the room for the woman
who would be her rival. “I used to walk the floor and shed tears of
sorrow,” she recounted in her own private memoir.

Then they were commanded to leave family and friends and build a new
settlement in the desert 300 miles south of Salt Lake City. Living at
first in primitive huts, they built a community, and Miles prospered.
Then came a new command to move 400 miles across the wilderness to
settle a desert patch in Arizona.

Again the Romneys were thrown back into primeval hardship. Miles, his
three wives and their many children lived in a small wooden house and
survived on bread, beans and gravy. There, as elsewhere, the locals
detested the Mormons for their polygamy, for their religion and for the
fact that the Mormons tended to outwork them. The local newspaper said
Miles should be hung for polygamy, so two of his wives were sent to hide
in cornfields and the mountains of New Mexico.

They were compelled to move again. Romney left his family to build a
colony in Mexico. It was 1885, and he was living out of a wagon. Hannah
led eight children through the Arizona mountains to join him. In Mexico,
they lived in a house with a dirt roof, so mud dropped down when it
rained. Eventually, all the wives and the 21 children were reunited.
Miles and his son Gaskell, Mitt’s grandfather, built a successful
community, with brick homes, churches and wealth.

George Romney, Mitt’s father, was born in Mexico. But when he was 5, in
1912, Mexican revolutionaries confiscated their property and threw them
out. Most of the Romneys fled back to the U.S. Within days, they went
from owning a large Mexican ranch to being penniless once again,
drifting from California to Idaho to Utah, where again they built a
fortune.

Mitt Romney can’t talk about his family history on the campaign trail.
Mormonism is an uncomfortable subject. But he must have been affected by
it.

It is a story of relentless effort, of recovery and of being despised
(in their eyes) because of their own success. Romney himself experienced
none of this hardship, of course, but Jews who didn’t live through the
Exodus are still shaped by it.


Romney seems to share his family’s remorseless drive to rise — whether
it’s trying to persuade the French to give up wine and join his church,
or building a business, or being willing to withstand heaps of abuse in
pursuit of the presidency. He may have character flaws, but he does not
have the character flaws normally associated with great wealth. His
signature is focus and persistence. The wealth issue is a sideshow.

yes i know most of the romney history even if i don't intimately know some of the details. but that's a bit besides the point isn't it? i hope the tax structure in the US becomes a central point during the debates. every guy is a republican until he finds someone making 100 times more. then suddenly tax fairness becomes a HUGE issue.

MaxEntropy_Man wrote: why should honest labor be taxed differently than money from investments? there are no analytical answers possible. it's a philosophical question.

Yes, it's a philosophical question alright. A Republican would argue that investors/job creators (those who provide opportunities for honest labor to honestly labor) should not be held back by taxes and prevented from providing more opportunities for others to excel through honest work, and thereby contribute towards the progress of the general society.

indophile wrote: A Republican would argue .....

the ruckus about romney's taxes is not being made in the general elections, but in the republican primaries. like i said, everyone is a republican until they find a guy way out of their league who is paying peanuts in taxes.

The irony is everyone knows he pays peanuts, but everything is legal I assume. But when it comes to changing the law to make him and other rich guys pay more, it;s the same republicans (those who belong to Teaparty denomination at that) who protest the most; doesn't matter even if it;s Warren Buffet who ssupports changing the law. I don't know whether you tag it as irony or hypocracy.

i tag it as stupidity and missing the irony gene completely. i bet if you made a genetic study of poor folks who vote republican, they'd be missing the irony gene.

Hellsangel wrote:

Romney pays 14% in taxes while most members of this community pay a lot more of their own income in taxes while earning a lot less than him. But the bigger story in this is Romney's offshore accounts. He had a Swiss bank account that he closed, because, in his words, "for Pete's sake, I am running for office." But he neglected to move his investments out of Cayman Islands funds that are incorporated there to minimize tax liabilities.

charvaka wrote:Romney pays 14% in taxes while most members of this community pay a lot more of their own income in taxes while earning a lot less than him. But the bigger story in this is Romney's offshore accounts. He had a Swiss bank account that he closed, because, in his words, "for Pete's sake, I am running for office." But he neglected to move his investments out of Cayman Islands funds that are incorporated there to minimize tax liabilities.

I heard how Romney managed to "shunt" $100 mil to his kids as estate without paying any taxes. Holy jesus. This is what I call Wall Street Looters - they loot legally.

Almost all equity fund managers make in the millions.