That Romney's disclosed account was with Swiss bank UBS has also
raised eyebrows. In 2008, a whistleblower at the bank informed the IRS
of thousands of accounts being operated by American clients to avoid
paying U.S. taxes. For Americans, the coveted Swiss secrecy suddenly
became a legal liability.

So much information was turned over to
the IRS that it would have been extremely difficult for the agency to
pursue cases against every offender. So the IRS established a special tax amnesty program,
which allowed those who voluntarily turned themselves in to remain
anonymous and pay limited penalties. Thousands of citizens have since
come forward

danivon wrote:

Doctor Fate wrote:She has horses as therapy--if they want to go after his wealth, there are other means.

I'm still confused as to how owning such a horse and spending so much on it is the only therapy that's available.

Fascinating that liberals see nothing as being out of bounds--as long as its about Romney.

So Jon Stewart isn't a Liberal now? And anyone else who says something like... "Reid appears to have gone overboard".

rickyp wrote:http://financialadviserblog.dowjones.com/blog/stay-ahead-of-your-clients/new-details-on-amnesty-for-overseas-savers

If Mitt avoided taxes illegally for years, then took advantage of an amnesty to avoid prosecutiuon or even avoid taxes as some did, that would certainly be embarressing. And politically more damaging than just having used every legal means to keep his taxes low.

That Romney's disclosed account was with Swiss bank UBS has also
raised eyebrows. In 2008, a whistleblower at the bank informed the IRS
of thousands of accounts being operated by American clients to avoid
paying U.S. taxes. For Americans, the coveted Swiss secrecy suddenly
became a legal liability.

So much information was turned over to
the IRS that it would have been extremely difficult for the agency to
pursue cases against every offender. So the IRS established a special tax amnesty program,
which allowed those who voluntarily turned themselves in to remain
anonymous and pay limited penalties. Thousands of citizens have since
come forward

.
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/r ... n-2808625/

Isn't there enough smoke from the Swiss bank account revelation to suggest that Romney should reveal his tax status for the years he held the Swiss bank account? Just to prove he wasn't acting illegally?

other words, someone told Reid that and until Romney proves otherwise, he did it.

Someone told me the President . . . (fill in the blank). He's guilty until he proves otherwise.

Baseless attacks, going after family members . . . Democratic politics at its finest

freeman2 wrote:Nothing wrong with accumulating wealth, SuperAnt, but I guarantee youRomney will not elected if he did not pay any taxes and he made tens of millions of dollars. "Ask not what you can do your country, ask what you can do for your country". Imagine Romney asking his fellow Americans to do anything when he has not paid any taxes.

As for your comparing attacks on Obama with Romney, they are not the same. First, a candidate should release tax returns for at least five years--paying taxes is part of the primary duties of being a citizen. If you want to be president, it is fair game for us to know that you have been paying your fair share of taxes. You may not care if Romney did not pay taxes, but a lot of Americans do.

Do you have a plausible reason as to why Romney has not released tax returns? You don't because there is none.

Your analogies are not applicable because there is substantial reason to think there is something wrong with the tax returns, whereas there was no reason to think that Obama was a communist, muslim, or not born in this country.

Nationalism was a tool for governments to get people to do things they would never do otherwise, like pay higher taxes.

Actually,I do. It's private information. You're asking him to release his tax returns. He's not releasing them. You may choose to not vote for him solely because of that reason, but that's a risk he takes.

There is a controversy because the Republican presidential nominee, Governor Mitt Romney, refuses to release his tax returns. As I said before, I was told by an extremely credible source that Romney has not paid taxes for ten years. People who make as much money as Mitt Romney have many tricks at their disposal to avoid paying taxes. We already know that Romney has exploited many of these loopholes, stashing his money in secret, overseas accounts in places like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.
Last weekend, Governor Romney promised that he would check his tax returns and let the American people know whether he ever paid a rate lower than 13.9 percent. One day later, his campaign raced to say he had no intention of putting out any further information.

When it comes to answering the legitimate questions the American people have about whether he avoided paying his fair share in taxes or why he opened a Swiss bank account, Romney has shut up. But as a presidential candidate, it’s his obligation to put up, and release several years’ worth of tax returns just like nominees of both parties have done for decades.

It’s clear Romney is hiding something, and the American people deserve to know what it is. Whatever Romney’s hiding probably speaks volumes about how he would approach issues that directly impact middle-class families, like tax reform and the economy. When you are running for president, you should be an open book.

I understand Romney is concerned that many people, Democrats and Republicans, have been calling on him to release his tax returns. He has so far refused. There is only one thing he can do to clear this up, and that’s release his tax returns.

freeman2 wrote:The only reason I saw DF for Romney not releasing his returns that you cited is he would be besieged with irrevelant questions.

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story." Many people said Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."

Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media's hysteria -- 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife "kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me."

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull's campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

As luck would have it, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic -- and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford's most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago.

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of -- again -- the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan's divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on "Star Trek: Voyager."

Jack Ryan had released his tax records. He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son.

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the custody case, Jack Ryan claimed that his wife had had an affair, and she counterclaimed with the allegation that he had taken her to "sex clubs" in Paris, New York and New Orleans, which drove her to fall in love with another man.

(Republicans: If you plan a career in public office, please avoid marrying a wacko.)

Ryan had vehemently denied her allegations at the time, but it didn't matter. The sex club allegations aired on "Entertainment Tonight," "NBC Nightly News," ABC's "Good Morning America," "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," and NBC's "Today" show. CNN covered the story like it was the first moon landing.

(Interestingly, international papers also were ablaze with the story -- the same newspapers that were supposed to be so bored with American sexual mores during Bill Clinton's sex scandal.)

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking "no" for an answer.

Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate.

And that's how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from "sealed" court records.

I suppose a candidate would like to characterize negative information as being irrevelant, but if there is nothing new in those tax returns no one is going to bother him with questions about them.

10. State senate papers. In the 2008 primary, Obama criticized Hillary Clinton for not releasing papers from her eight years as First Lady--but failed to produce any papers from his eight years in Springfield. “They could have been thrown out,” he said.

9. Academic transcripts. His supposed academic brilliance was a major selling point, but Obama (by his own admission) was a mediocre student. His GPA at Occidental was a B-plus at best, and his entering class at Columbia was weak. Can he prove his merit?

8. Book proposal. Obama’s literary agent claimed he was “born in Kenya”--for sixteen years. His original book proposal exists--biographer David Maraniss refers to it--and seems to have embellished other key details of his life. Yet it has never been released.

7. Medical records. In 2000, and again (briefly) in 2008, GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain released thousands of pages of his medical records. Obama, who had abused drugs and continued smoking, merely provided a one-page doctor’s note.

6. Small-dollar donors. In 2008, the McCain campaign released the names of donors who had contributed less than $200, though it was not required to do so. But the Obama campaign refused, amidst accusations it had accepted illegal foreign contributions.

5. The Khalidi tape. In 2003, Obama attended a party for his good friend, the radical Palestinian academic Rashid Khalidi. The event featured incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric. The LA Times broke the story, but has refused to release the tape--and so has Obama.

4. The real White House guest list. Touting its transparency, the Obama White House released its guest logs--but kept many visits secret, and moved meetings with lobbyists off-site. It also refused to confirm the identities of visitors like Bertha Lewis of ACORN.

3. Countless FOIA requests. The Obama administration has been described as “the worst” ever in complying with Freedom of Information Act requests for documents. It has also punished whistleblowers like David Walpin, who exposed cronyism in Americorps.

2. Health reform negotiations. Candidate Obama promised that health care reform negotiations would be televised on C-SPAN. Instead, there were back-room deals woth millions with lobbyists and legislators--the details of which are only beginning to emerge.

1. Fast and Furious documents. After months of stonewalling Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder asked President Obama to use executive privilege to conceal thousands of documents related to the deadly scandal--and Obama did just that.

SuperAnt you realize that Romney released 23 years of tax returns to McCain. So he applies for the job of vice-president and releases 23 year of tax returns to McCain but refuses to release even 5 years to the general public when he is applying for the job of president. Why was it fair for McCain to require that he see Romney's returns and not fair for the American people to do so?

There really isn't a plausbile reason not to release those returns unless there is something negative in them.

If he doesn't release them he is going to be asked numerous questions as to whether he ever paid zero taxes or less than 13.9%, which he would not have to worry about if he just released them.

Sorry, Superant, I don't buy the argument about tax deductions at all. First of all, if you pay zero taxes and make many millions of dollars you are skirting the limits of tax law.

Note, please, that we seem to be back to one source for this information — “an extremely credible source,” but Reid did not use a plural. Earlier in the week, Reid claimed to have “a number of sources,” and that “the word is out.” So which is it? One extremely credible source from Bain who somehow got to look at Romney’s personal taxes for a ten-year period even though no one would have access to that except the Romneys, their accountant, and the IRS? Or a number of sources who say “the word is out”? Reid’s sounding more and more like Joe McCarthy every day.

Ray Jay wrote:It's private information, but it is extremely relevant to federal policy. At issue is the tax burden of the wealthy vs. the middle class. Romney's has strong views on the issue. Romney has also benefited from the lower tax rates enjoyed by private equity firms which has also been a policy issue. Throw in the fact that he managed to move high value assets to tax free retirement accounts at low valuations, and has apparently taken advantage of off shore accounts, and this all strikes me as legitimate.

I'm perplexed that Romney did not ensure that his last several tax returns are squeeky clean.

He has been running for president for 6 years. There's a lot of grey in the US tax law, and he should not be living on the edge of that grey, which is the occam razor explanation for his failure to release his returns.

This really goes to questions about his judgement as well as tax policy.

By the way, I was a tax preparer for several years, and my experience was that patriotic people were incredibly honest tax payers. This is a legitimate issue, and if Romney doesn't release them and deal with it, there will be some impact on the electorate. I agree with you that he is taking a huge risk.

freeman2 wrote:See RJ"s excellent post, DF. The stuff you are talking about is personal information not related to policy and need not be disclosed; Romney's tax returns are germane to policy (as cogently explained by RJ). I think Occam's Razor means go with the obvious answer here as to why Romney would not disclose his tax returns. The reason I keep repeating that Romney has no reason not to disclose his tax returns unless there is something negative is that you have not come up a good reason as to why he should not disclose them.

When the rational middle (RJ) is against Romney on this issue, things are not looking good for him.