10 thoughts on “Submitted for Comment”

  1. I found the page that explains the foreign tax credit at the IRS site.

    You can choose to take the amount of any qualified foreign income taxes paid or accrued during the year as a foreign tax credit or as an itemized deduction.

    So it does look like you can write off the full amount, and of course Romney has boasted about never paying a single cent more in taxes than he absolutely has to. So if he didn’t take the credit, then either his foreign taxes didn’t qualify for some reason, or there was no US federal income tax to offset.

    I’m not an accountant, but that’s how it looks to me.

  2. I wish I knew.
    What I know about Federal taxes would fit on the back of a postage stamp.

    But the way Mitt’s been acting since Harry Reid said that he had a source or two who said the Romney’s didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years, is beyond suspicious.

    Instead of telling Harry to “Put up, or shut up!”, in the stupidest empty challenge in history, why didn’t Mitt take that opportunity to pull an Obama, and whip out his tax returns, to embarrass Senator Reid and make him look like Donald Trump “The Chump,” at the WH Press Correspondents Dinner?

    What self-respecting Republican politician would pass up the opportunity to humiliate a prominent Democrat?

    Oh, there’s something very, very wrong in those tax returns.
    Probably NOT something illegal.
    And showing them, would be committing politcal suicide.

    Here’s some interesting speculation:
    http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/10-theories-about-what-mitt-romneys-really-hiding-those-tax-returns?paging=off

    The most interesting one, is that maybe Mitt hasn’t been tithing as much as he’s supposed to to the Mormon Church, and is afraid of the backlash.
    After all, he’s one of the Grand High Exalted Poobah’s, or whatever his title – and how would it look if he was stiffing his church all these years?
    Why, maybe even the Dominionist Christian morons might take offense. It may not be THEIR church – but, it’s still A church!

  3. Extraordinarily incorrect English: “that him and the Mrs. have” should be “that he and the Mrs. have”.

  4. …maybe Mitt hasn’t been tithing as much as he’s supposed to to the Mormon Church…

    That reminds me: Harry Reid is a Mormon too. Does that matter? Possibly not, but it suggests one network through which Reid could have heard what he heard, if he did in fact hear it.

  5. I suspect that the Rmoneys file their taxes separately, and that Mrs. R. is hiding a large treasure. Didn’t MA campaigner Mitt make some remarks about needing to see the returns of an opponent’s spouse?

    Those people are all about stockpiling money, not service. We all recognize that.

  6. I don’t know enough about the subject to offer anything intelligent, but to me the main thing is not how much or how little tax Mitt has paid – which I admit is just me, this is a big item to many in this country. The main thing is that this guy has oodles of money stashed overseas, unlike every other president.

    I associate Swiss bank accounts with corrupt leaders of third world countries. Guys with big cigars, berets, sunglasses, pistols, and wearing military uniforms with medals and epaulets and such. Mitt doesn’t quite fit that role, but he’s clearly got his parachute extremely well packed – along with everyone else in the .001% club I would bet – and that scares me far more than whatever tax he’s paid or not. If the USA goes under, like some Bain Capital takeover – oh well, the Mittster can just flee to another country. Party on, dude.

  7. I’m afraid it’s not quite so bad as it looks (sigh), though the reasoning is basically sound.

    But before getting down to business — after all, having investments in foreign countries is not in itself wicked. Where would the U! S! A! be if the British (and others) hadn’t massively invested in American development projects like railroads in the 19th century? Probably a lot poorer (and Brittannia would have lacked some income, but we’re talking about our own interests here). And if you make an investment overseas, then you’re taxed on it overseas, and it doesn’t really make sense to pay all over again over here. Hence the credits.

    Now to buseiness. If you get a really good look at the title line of that table, you see “Passive Category Income”. Romney has a shit-load of that kind of stuff, which is investments in limited partnerships and the like, where you have no control of the operation you’ve put money in.

    Like f’rinstance, his egregious horse, a passive activity, though this one is in the US. That $77,000 or whatever is a passive activity tax loss that he can turn into a deduction only in a year in which he has passive *gains* against which he can take a deduction. Plain old zillions in other income? Sorry, gotta pay tax on that, can’t charge off the $77,000. And the story is that he’ll have to wait for some other year when he gets those other profits and meanwhile “carry forward” this deduction on his books. (These rather ghastly regulations were passed to suppress some of the most outrageous tax shelters.)

    And the same goes with foreign tax payments. If he paid foreign governments $81,000 tax on *that* kind of income, he can take it off his US taxes only when he’s liable for US taxes on passive gains. And he apparently didn’t have any such gains in the US in 2009, so he’s carrying the potential deduction forward till that changes.

    In short: We don’t know whether he was liable for *any* US taxes, but this shows he didn’t pay taxes on passive gains in the US in ’09.

    Not as good a story, but, you know, he’s still a schmuck.

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