I’ve thought for some time that Harry Reid’s claim that Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years was the functional, liberal equivalent of birtherism. In both cases someone made something up then demanded to be proven wrong via the release of a document.
But the longer this goes on, the less sure I am. Reid is no Donald Trump. He’s smarter than that. For him to still be on this, he’s either the most devoted political suicide bomber in history, or he actually thinks he has something. I’m starting to get the feeling its the latter. I dismissed this whole thing as an embarrassment before, but now I’m not so sure.
520 Chestnut 
As did I. Makes no sense for Reid to keep this up unless there’s something untoward with Romney’s taxes.
Unfortunately, this mystery will never be solved, as I predict Romney will not disclose anything more.
I’m confused, are you suggesting that Romney may have unlawfully avoided paying taxes for ten years? If so, wouldn’t the IRS, having full access to Romney’s tax returns and being run by Obama, be levying some fine or putting Romney in jail?
Or, are you suggesting that, like General Electric, Romney was able to have a net tax burden of zero for ten years? If that is the case, why is that so important? Wouldn’t it make Romney stupid to pay taxes he wasn’t obligated to pay?
Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t really understand a plausible scenario for somebody to be upset over this. I’m not a “birther”, but at least at the root of that whole mess was an actual legal issue.
I’m suggesting… well nothing really. I have no idea what’s going on. Like I said I originally dismissed the whole thing as idiotic and somewhat still do, I just find Reid’s persistence odd, in that it makes me think he actually isn’t making it all up. If it is in fact true that Romney paid no taxes for 10 years, or even 1, I don’t think he would have done so illegally, so let me be absolutely clear that I do not think Romney is guilty of a crime. (If it turns out he paid nothing illegally that’s a different story but again I don’t think that’s the case) As you suggested I think the more likely scenario, if any of this is true, would be that Romney (or really his tax planner) was able to structure things in such a way as to reduce his effective tax rate to very low or zero. And if that’s the case, he paid what he should have. I agree it’s stupid to pay taxes you don’t need to pay! A better parallel than birtherism, then, would be all the calls from the Fox News folks for Warren Buffet to voluntarily raise his own taxes if he thought they should be higher.
The point is not so much a “legal” issue as a policy issue. Romney has proposed a tax plan that would reduce taxes on folks with similar wealth to his because he believes that they’re so high as to be burdensome. But this argument becomes less credible when its being made by someone who has an effective tax rate of zero! You can’t tell me that your taxes are so high as to prevent you from investing / creating jobs / trickling down / whatever when you don’t pay taxes! I would not blame Romney for (legally) paying no taxes, I would blame our tax system that lets him. Where I would blame Romney is for proposing policy that would exacerbate the problem.
It would also mean he’s lying, but that’s not exactly a shocker at this point.
This is exactly the same as the birther issue. The birthers keep bringing up the stupid birth certificate thing because they want to reinforce and affirm certain people’s fears and racist feelings about Obama so that they will be more likely to get out and vote republican on election day.It didn’t matter if the actual birth certificate was released because they found a way to keep up the narrative. Democrats will/are doing the exact same thing with the tax return issue. They want to reinforce the narrative that Romney is an incredibly wealthy, out of touch business man who is greedy and can’t be trusted and that low taxes are just a ploy by the rich to take more money from the poor. If he doesn’t release his tax returns, speculations about why he won’t release them will continue and the theme will be that he is a shifty guy who has found sneaky ways to keep all of his insane amount of money. If he does release his tax returns, they will be used as evidence that he is a wealthy, out of touch big business man who cares not and knows not about the plight of the poor. Of course he keeps bringing it up, he’d be an idiot not to. It’s an incredibly easy pitch in the dirt that Romney can do nothing about.