Washington, D.C. — Today, Tom Perriello, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, issued the following statement today reacting to the release of Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax return:
The overdue release of Gov. Romney’s 2011 tax return and failure to offer more than a cryptic summary of earlier years both raise more questions than they answer.
What Americans did learn today is that Gov. Romney had to artificially engineer his tax rate to avoid paying only about 9 percent on almost $14 million in investment income. Even with his accounting trick, he still paid a lower percentage in taxes than the millions of working Americans who Gov. Romney derided as lazy victims of government dependency.
Gov. Romney’s cooked tax rate of 14.1 percent is also still lower than that of the millions of middle-class families, who would see a $2,000 tax increase under a Romney presidency.
Gov. Romney himself recently said that if he paid more than he owed, it would “disqualify” him from being president. But that’s exactly what he did, as we saw today when he released his 2011 tax returns just to generate better headlines.
Gov. Romney should immediately meet the standard expected by the American people, a standard he set for his vice presidential nominee—10 years of full tax returns. It is time for Gov. Romney to come clean about his own tax returns and the tax returns he will be imposing on America’s middle class.
To speak with a CAP Action expert on this topic, please contact Katie Peters at 202.741.6285 or [email protected].
Related resources from CAP Action’s Romney U series:
The series aims to inform voters about the true cost of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s policy proposals.
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