"Mitt Romney's $250 million fortune is largely a black hole: Aside from the meager and vague disclosures he has filed under federal and Massachusetts laws, and the two years of partial tax returns (one filed and another provisional) he has released, there is almost no data on precisely what his vast holdings consist of, or what vehicles he has used to escape taxes on his income. Gawker has obtained a massive cache of confidential financial documents that shed a great deal of light on those finances, and on the tax-dodging tricks available to the hyper-rich that he has used to keep his effective tax rate at roughly 13% over the last decade." (our emphasis)
"Mitt Romney today said that he did indeed ‘go back and look’ at his tax returns and that he never paid less than 13% in taxes in any year over the past decade. Since there is substantial reason to doubt his claims, we have a simple message for him: prove it. Even though he’s invested millions in foreign tax havens, offshore shell corporations, and a Swiss bank account, he’s still asking the American people to trust him. However, given Mitt Romney's secrecy about his returns, coupled with the revelations in just the one return we have seen to date and the inconsistencies between this one return and his other financial disclosures, he has forfeited the right to have us take him just at his word."
"We'll believe it when we see it. Until Mitt Romney releases his tax returns, Americans will continue to wonder what he's hiding. Romney seems to think he plays by a different set of rules than every other presidential candidate for the last thirty years, all of whom lived up to the standard of transparency set by Mitt Romney's father and released their tax returns."
"What strikes you as more improbable: That Harry Reid has a mysterious source with intimate knowledge of Romney’s finances? Or that a man who made a quarter of a billion dollars from his skill at reading balance sheets has no clue of how much he’s been paying in taxes?You can take all the lame, "fair and balanced," both-sides-do-it fact checkers (lookin' at you, Glenn Kessler) and dithering "liberal" hand-wringers like the always-reliable Richard Cohen, and you still can't alter the impression that Swiss Mitt must be hiding something pretty bad, or else he would have laid his returns out for all to see by now.
"Neither, on its face, sounds terribly likely. But Reid isn’t running for president — and he doesn’t even have to run for reelection until 2016, assuming he chooses to do so. Romney could dramatically boost his credibility by opening his personal books to the normal degree of public scrutiny. The fact that he won’t — even when continued secrecy clearly hurts the campaign, if only by diverting attention from other issues Romney would rather be talking about — clearly means there’s something embarrassing, inappropriate or just plain ugly in there.
"You don’t need a secret source to tell you that. Common sense will do." (our emphasis)
"I have no idea why Reid decided to go all-in on this point. Maybe he's just fed up with the Republicans and what they've done to the Senate that he loves. Maybe it's some sort of intramural Mormon brawl that the rest of us just don't understand. I am open to any suggestion based on the concept of pure old-dude cussedness. I don't have any idea whether Willard Romney paid no taxes, or some taxes, or paid an annual tribute to Anubis, Egyptian God Of The Dead, over the years in question. Neither, I would point out, do Glenn Kessler, or his tax experts, or the PolitiFact elves, or Reince Priebus. This is because Willard Romney, unlike any presidential candidate of my experience, declines to share those details with The Help as he seeks to be appointed CEO of America. But neither am I morally outraged that Reid is playing the kind of politics he is playing with this. That is because, when I consider what he's doing, I do not think of Joe McCarthy. I think of Vince Foster, and I am conspicuously unmoved."
"Mitt Romney’s brazen attitude toward Bain Capital’s dealings in Panama, coupled with his refusal to release his tax returns, shows he is more than out of touch with the causes of the men and women he would serve. He is openly at odds with their financial well-being. How is it that someone can talk relatively openly about having potentially taxable income parked overseas and remain a viable candidate for the highest public office? How often, really, do places with lax banking regulations such as Liechtenstein, or Andorra, or Switzerland enter our national dialogue? [snip]
"[W]hen all of those individual [American plutocrat] offshore accounts are considered as a whole, they present a resoundingly clear and alarming picture. All of that potentially taxable income sitting in tax havens amounts to billions—some estimates say trillions—of dollars lost from the American tax pool. For local communities, this translates into a host of government services and programs that won’t be launched because the revenue that would have funded them has been lost forever."
