Romney Tax Returns: Harry Reid Says Romney Has Not Paid Taxes in 10 Years

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney refused to release several years of tax returns as Democrats demanded, speculation began about what he could be hiding. Romney did release his 2010 federal tax return, although he did redact his address for some odd reason. When that return was released he was forced to amend his Federal Elections Commission filing to include his Swiss bank account. But what about prior years?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he spoke with an investor in Romney's former private equity firm, Bain Capital. The unnamed investor claimed that Romney hadn't paid any taxes for 10 years! This revelation comes two weeks after the Obama campaign began running an ad questioning whether Romney has paid any taxes. Joshua Green, writing for Businessweek, speculated that Romney may have suffered a large enough capital loss in the 2008 global financial meltdown, that coupled with his various offshore tax havens, he may have managed to legally not pay any federal taxes owed in 2009.

Romney is the first presidential candidate with a Swiss bank account. He is the first presidential candidate to aggressively offshore his money to avoid...what? Taxes. And he wants the American people to let him run the government. Not only is Romney very bad in relating to humans, he just doesn't get it. He has no idea what this country needs to recover from 30 years of deregulation, union-busting, and shifting the weight of taxes from the very wealthy to the shrinking middle class.

Of course all of this is mere speculation. We can only imagine what Romney's tax returns would reveal. Maybe he is just a fabulously wealthy man who made his fortune buying up companies and strip- mining them of all their assets. Maybe he didn't tithe his church enough. But we won't know because  Romney would rather have us speculate than show us once and for all.