Romney's bitter loss to Newt Gingrich in the Republican primary in South Carolina demonstrated that playing the patrician elite above the fray has its limits as a campaign strategy. Romney's strategists had apparently thought that they could get away with not releasing tax returns--at least not any except his 2011 ones (maybe) when filed--but they hadn't counted on vicious attacks from the GOP right that questions his vulture capital millions and his top1% effective tax rate. That's what happens when there is a campaigner who thinks that earning $370,000 from speeches given to meaningless conventions of some trade or another is "just a little money", while admitting that the money he still earns from the vulture fund where he oversaw takeovers of companies (and layoffs of employees and offshoring of work) manages to be taxed at a preferential rate of merely 15%.
So after the loss to Gingrich (an odd man to try to claim a populist mantle when he had a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany's and disposes of old wives the way most people dispose of old socks), Romney has now announced that he will release returns plus an estimate of his 2011 taxes due. See Michael Shear, Romney to Release Tax Returns on Tuesday, The Caucus, New York Times (Jan. 22, 2012).
One does wonder why it will be Tuesday when they are released. Why not today? or six months ago? Will they be redacted? Will the accompanying schedules that show his income coming through tax haven "companies" located in the law offices that house 18,000 others in the Caymans be there? Questions that we will have fun examining on Tuesday, anyway.
Oh, and Mitch Daniels, current governor of Indiana and Bush assistant who helped preside over the real growth of the federal deficit as Bush pushed through huge tax cuts while increasing federal spending (especially on preemptive wars), will give the GOP response to the State of the Union message. The Tea Party has picked Herman CAin--the author of the infamous 9-9-9 plan who wanted to shift the tax burden brutally onto the backs of the working poor. The GOP seems to have tax cuts for the rich accompanied by increasing burdens for the poor in its blood, doesn't it.
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