Romney must be hiding something really awful in those tax returns

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Otherwise, why else refuse to release them?

As Matthew Dowd put it: "There's obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, 'Have at it.' So there's obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.

And, obviously, there's some good ol' political calculation at work here.

As George Will put it: "The cost of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them."

So, yes, there must something really awful in them, he doesn't want made public.

A couple of good pieces to read:

-- Joshua Green: "What's Romney Hiding in His Tax Returns?"

-- Ezra Klein: "Did Mitt Romney pay any federal taxes at all in 2009?"

Of course, Romney himself is to blame for all the speculation. And while we may not know what he's hiding, it's possible to make some education guesses. Here's Klein, for example:

For what it's worth — and, since I haven't see Romney's 2009 tax return, it's not worth much — my guess is he paid some federal taxes in 2009. The sort of tax sheltering he would have needed to get to zero would be quasi-suicidal for a presidential aspirant. But his effective federal tax rate may only have been 3 or 4 or 5 percent, which would be nearly as bad as zero. Add in a couple of shelters that Romney fears would look particularly bad, given the microscopic attention being paid to his taxes, and it's probably enough to persuade him that some bad press for tax decisions people think he might have made is preferable to a feeding frenzy over tax decisions he definitely made.

The question none of this answers is why Romney didn't clean up his taxes in 2008 and 2009. But it's always worth remembering that the people running for office are human beings who procrastinate and make bad decisions and get distracted by other things. And given that Romney moves in a world where aggressive tax planning is the norm rather than the exception, he might simply have failed to recognize what a priority simplifying his taxes really was. My hunch is that the person spending the most time wondering why Romney didn’t get his taxes in order in 2008 is... Mitt Romney.

He may be right, but I think his assessment is too soft on Romney.

Sure, Mitt's a human being who has obviously made some bad decisions, and, sure, in his world, creative tax planning is de rigueur, but his arrogance, secrecy, and sense of entitlement, three of his core traits, are on full display here, and they reflect not just a flawed but a repugnant character, not to mention a deeper problem for his candidacy.