Those percentages reported are just flat out wrong. They report the tax as a percent of gross income and not taxable income.
Mitt had a reported much lower rate on his 2011 tax return, somewhere around 13%, but that was of gross.
I bet the actual tax rate is somewhere around 30-33% of taxable income.
Why the news agencies report a tax rate based on gross income is just flat out misleading or out and out lying.
Originally Posted by KCJoe
The reason for Romney's effective tax rate (reported to have been about 14% in 2011) is unknown, since few details were released. However, we may reasonably surmise the following:
The vast bulk of his income is almost certainly carried interest, and he may have had some income from capital gains and qualified dividends. Any of those would have been taxed at a 15% top marginal tax rate. (Which rose to 23.8% for the 2013 tax year.) Few people in the VC and private equity industries take any "conventional" salary or fee income exposed to the top-bracket 39.6% rate. You may argue that in a
de facto sense, it's reasonable to consider that Romney pays more tax than is reported (even thought not in a direct way) because of what's referred to as "tax incidence," but that's a whole different issue. Many people have written theses and dissertations on the issue of corporate tax incidence without arriving at any clear consensus.
It was brought up time and time again that such and such only wrote a check for 15 percent, when his secretary was paying 25 percent. Much was made of "loop holes", and other seemingly dishonest ways that the "rich" avoided paying.
Originally Posted by Jackie S
I don't think the ways Buffett, Romney, and others benefited from lower rates should be considered "seemingly dishonest," since they are simply complying with the law as written. However, I understand why people believe that preferential rates for different types of "income" are unfair, and that some changes in the rules of the game are in order.
Now, it seems that the President is one of the very people that he warned his block of voters about. He is a guy who makes over $600,000 a year, and only paid 18 percent in taxes.
Originally Posted by Jackie S
Since he gave about a quarter of his income to charities of various kinds, I don't really have a problem with that (assuming that all the recipients chose deserving sets of beneficiaries).
But there does seem to be a bit of irony connected with his overall body of statements and actions, doesn't there?