The Larger Question About Romney’s Taxes Returns: Why?

I have long held the view that one doesn't act as if they have something to hide unless they actually DO have something to hide.  That approach would certainly seem to be the case with Mitt Romney's refusal to release additional years of tax returns.  Yes, it's possible that Romney's refusal is merely due to his overall pompousness and attitude that he doesn't have to account to anyone, but as a piece in The New Republic ponders, that just doesn't seem to add up.  Thus, again the question becomes that of what is Romney trying to hide?  The second related question is why, since Romney has been running for president for roughly six years, didn't he clean up his finances for public viewing knowing that it had to be coming?  Greed may be the reason.  A desire to save every dollar possible and avoid every tax possible.  Here are some column highlights:

Mitt Romney arrives back stateside and just like that, his refusal to release more than a year or two of tax returns is back in the news. Harry Reid is telling people that a big Bain Capital investor told him that Romney told him that he didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years. OK, that sounds like something out of a junior-high cafeteria, but then again there’s also an easy way for Romney to knock it down. Which again raises the question: What can possibly be in the returns to make them so dicey to release? 

Why in the world did someone who has been running for president since late 2006 not years ago rid his personal finances of anything that could cause problems in a campaign—Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island shelters, questionable IRAs, and whichever even more troublesome features lurk in the unreleased returns?   .   .   .   .  Why would he not have fixed his finances as carefully as his coiffure before venturing out onto the stage?

Well, one plausible theory was offered me recently by someone who served alongside Romney in Massachusetts government: Romney may be cautious, but he is also, famously, a penny-pincher. Consider the story that got him in some hot water when he returned from running the Salt Lake City Olympics to run for governor in Massachusetts  .   .  .   .   his assertion of having kept Massachusetts as his primary home even while running the Olympics was undermined by the revelation that Romney had claimed a property tax break for his Utah home that was reserved for people who make Utah their primary residence. 

Why would someone as ambitious as Romney was—who had made clear his intention to follow his father into politics—risk trouble over basic residency questions just for the sake of a tax break on a second home? But consider what else was going on around the same time‚ as the Globe reported in a fine bit of recent digging that was somewhat overlooked on the day of the Aurora, Colo. shootings: Romney was also risking some goodwill and some future political troubles in his handling of his departure from Bain, all for the sake of collecting as big an exit payout as possible.

Romney stayed on as Bain’s CEO and sole shareholder in the years he was running the Olympics in order to retain the leverage for his big payout—even though it would mean potentially problematic association with Bain deals from those years, down the line. And now the taxes. In today’s New York Times, Michael Graetz, a veteran of George H. W. Bush's administration, helpfully lays out some of the gray-area tax-avoidance that someone in Romney’s position may well have engaged in over the past decade or two, such as skirting gift taxes on the $100 million trust Romney has set up for his sons.

 

Titled “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” it showed through quizzes, online games, questionnaires, in-lab manipulations, and field studies that living high on the socioeconomic ladder can, colloquially speaking, dehumanize people. It can make them less ethical, more selfish, more insular, and less compassionate than other people. It can make them more likely, as Piff demonstrated in one of his experiments, to take candy from a bowl of sweets designated for children. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff says, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”

Sounds like Piff was thinking of Romney.