RightChange: Romney Pays More Than 15% In Taxes

After countless demands from his competition, Mitt Romney released his federal tax rate: 15%.  This gave TEAM Obama the open door to criticize Romney for being a vulture capitalist who pays less than his secretary in taxes.  However, a recent article from the Wall Street Journal shows that there are a lot more taxes where that 15% came from.  Romney knows this, but he has done a poor job of explaining it.

“Start with the fact that, like Warren Buffett, Mr. Romney said he makes most of his money from investments, not wages or salary. Thus his income is really taxed twice: once at the corporate tax rate of 35%, then again at a 15% tax rate when it is passed through to him as dividends or via capital gains from the sale of stock.

All income from businesses is eventually passed through to the owners, so to ignore business taxes creates a statistical illusion that makes it appear that the rich pay less than they really do. By this logic, if the corporate tax rate were raised to, say, 60% from today's 35% and the dividend and capital gains tax were cut to zero, it would appear that business owners were getting away with paying no federal tax at all.”
 

When Romney says he pays 15%, he means just federal income tax alone.  Our current tax plan taxes the top 1% at a 35% income tax rate. That is just the income tax; it excludes Capital Gains tax, State tax, and the Alternative Minimum tax, and the Payroll tax.  This adds approximately 17% of extra taxes to the top 1% of income earners.  This means that approximately 52% of their income goes to the government.

Romney needs to break this down for everyone in the public eye or President Obama’s class warfare strategy will win in 2012.

Back To Blog