Mitt Romney Creates a Job, Below the Poverty Line

We all have heard about Mitt Romney's overseas investments, his Swiss bank account, and his $100 million IRA, so what, he's rich.  But wait there's more! The campaign itself admitted that Mitt's tax return is hundreds of pages long and full of tasty bits of information, so I took it upon myself to find something to write about that the national news hadn't already dragged through the street on prime time.  Thankfully for my rigorous exercise schedule, it didn't take long.

As most people already know, Mr. Romney has refused to release more than his most recent (2010) tax return.  The one which, as his father put it, was "done for show."  You can read about it here at CNN.  The overriding theory is that following the 2008 stock market crash, the Romney's investment accounts lost so much value that they wrote the loss off, and paid no taxes at all in 2009.

So I eagerly dug into the one return Mitt was generous enough to let "us people" have.  You can read along here, it's very dense.  It's true Mitt made a staggering amount of money that year, $21.6 million to be more specific.  He also paid a very low tax rate of 13.9% (much lower than this blogger's tax rate), but that isn't unusual for very wealthy people, and it isn't the point of this article.

The point is that not only is the Romney household dripping with cash and Olympic horse muck, it is also a job creation machine!  It is a household that had at least one employee in 2010 - this means it employed more people than 80% of all small businesses is the United States!

Yes friends the Romney household did indeed employee someone - maid, cook, masseuse, shoe-shine boy, we simply don't know.  What we do know however is that Mr. and Mrs. Romney paid that person only $20,603 in 2010.  Staggering I know, but out of this mighty salary, the Romneys withheld $4,119 in Federal taxes from these wages, making their employee's take-home pay $1,373 per month, and their tax rate 20%**

Mitt Romeny and Co. clearly cannot understand what anyone who is out of work - or simply struggling to make their Ferrari payment - is going through right now.  A candidate as secretive as him, whose campaign is funded by more private donations than any in history, is fraught with risk for the country at large.  And after watching his performance in Europe and Israel this week, let's all hope to see a bit more compassion and transparency from the Republican's only hope to defeat the President this Fall.



**The tax return reports the unemployment, SS and Medicare taxes the employer (Mittens & Co.) paid.  The employee's share is usually about the same, but it varies from state to state, and since I don't get paid to do this, and I don't live in MA, I did not do my due diligence on this one.