that s a much more outrageous charge than the charge that romney has used a really standard accounting trick that, again, there s a piece in u. u. news & world report right now about how romney could have done this. he probably didn t do it for ten years, but it s not beyond the realm of possibility at all. it may not even be illegal to do what he has done. that s kind of the point, right? the point is that we re in the middle of a big debate about what is the proper tax rate for millionaires and for the 1% in this country? and this is a kind of demonstration of how the current tax system works. i mean, the fact is is that he released tax returns that showed him paying, i think it was 13.9%. he won t say that he s paid less that be that or he won t say that he s never paid less than that, so i think he almost certainly has paid less than that in the past. ari, i want to remind everybody, as the worth mccarthyism is trotted out and bandied about, we are also talking about a r
want us to see. the big calculation is he thinks this will hurt him with the american people. they won t comprehend any of the stuff because they don t live like this. here is romney asked about his tax rate from abc news. we know that there was one year when you paid about a 13.9% tax rate. can we clear this up by asking you a simple yes or no question? was there ever any year when you paid lower than the 13.9%? i haven t calculated that. i m happy to go back and look. david, is it possible mitt romney can t calculate what his tax rate was in prior years? no, it is not possible. and someone who is as money motivated as mitt romney knows exactly what he paid in taxes taef every year. there s a huge scandal in italy where he made an investment when he was running bain that returned $28 for every dollar they put in and paid essentially no income taxes.
standard accounting trick that, again, there s a piece in u.s. news & world report right now about how romney could have done this. he probably didn t do it for ten years, but it s not beyond the realm of possibility at all. it may not even be illegal to do what he has done. that s kind of the point, right? the point is that we re in the middle of a big debate about what is the proper tax rate for millionaires and for the 1% in this country? and this is a kind of demonstration of how the current tax system works. i mean, the fact is is that he released tax returns that showed him paying, i think it was 13.9%. he won t say that he s paid less that be that or he won t say that he s never paid less than that, so i think he almost certainly has paid less than that in the past. ari, i want to remind everybody, as the worth mccarthyism is trotted out and bandied about, we are also talking about a republican party, elected officials from steve king to gene schmidt, newt gingrich,
indeed, he is wrong. and clearly, romney does not want to open the taxes. you have to conclude there s something in there he doesn t want us to see. the big calculation is he thinks this will hurt him with the american people. they won t comprehend any of this stuff because they don t live like this. here is romney asked about his tax rate by abc news. we know that there was one year when you paid about a 13.9% tax rate. can we clear this up by asking you a simple yes or no question? was there ever any year when you paid lower than the 13.9%? i haven t calculated that. i m happy to go back and look. david, is it possible mitt romney can t calculate what his tax rate was in prior years? no, it is not possible. and someone who is as money motivated as mitt romney knows exactly what he paid in taxes every year. he s worked very hard not to pay taxes. there s a huge scandal in italy where he made an investment when he was running bain that returned $28 for every dollar they put i
white house press secretary jay carney basically said, well, put up or shut up. you all probably know senator reid well, and, you know, he speaks for himself. there s a question for governor romney, right? he, as recently as last week, i think on abc, said that he would be happy to check if he paid a lower effective tax rate in previous years than the 13.9% that he paid in the year related to the tax return that he did release. romney has yet to satisfactorily answer that question or this one. instead of just going back and forth with harry reid, why not just release the tax returns and just put the issue to bed? well, actually, you can go on our website and you can see my financial disclosure statements going back to 2002. you also can see the tax returns that i ve put out for 2010. and those are, i think hundreds of pages of documents.