Mitt's tax returns: Why they've mattered

So now we know how much Mitt Romney makes. It' s $42.6 million over the past two years, according to the fluttering of tax returns and estimates he released early this morning. A few clicks of the calculator tell us that's a little more than $80,000 each workday, or $10,000 an hour. Those kind of numbers would make some of the 1 percent envious.

But if you haven't previously had a problem with Romney's business successes - and we don't - then the returns won't introduce anything newly troubling. If you're uncomfortable with the size of his portfolio, then today's numbers will affirm that uneasiness.

There's nothing in the release, however, that hasn't already been explored in this campaign.

The returns show he tithes faithfully to his church, but we're past his Mormonism being a factor in the campaign, if it ever was.

The returns show he makes money from a continued affiliation with Bain Capital, the company he co-founded. But Americans have settled for now that Bain's brand of wealth building is a sometimes ugly but acceptable form of capitalism.

The returns also show that his effective tax rate is just under 14 percent, lower than many middle-class Americans. He confronted that discrepancy, finally, in Monday's debate in Tampa, saying that he'd like to overhaul the tax code so that more Americans are able to pay the rates he does.

All of which means the tax returns should do Romney little damage today - but that's mostly because he already allowed the discussions they prompt to get away from him. Instead of initially framing his time at Bain as free enterprise at work, he let it first be a debate over the jobs the company lost and gained. Instead of using his tax rate and returns to show how unwieldy and incomprehensible the tax code has become, he stammered at debates over what he'd reveal.

With each misstep, it's become more difficult to convince voters not to be uncomfortable with his wealth, because he clearly seems to be. Perhaps that stems from Romney's uneasiness with making personal details public, as his campaign has suggested. Perhaps it's more a product of the country's new bout of self-examination over income inequality.

Many Republicans will dismiss the latter as a liberal phenomenon, but the South Carolina primary showed again that might not be true. In Newt Gingrich, South Carolinians chose someone every bit as inconsistent as Romney on policy, but with far more personal and ethical baggage. It was a replay of sorts of most every primary Romney has entered. Republicans simply haven't connected to him - for lots of reasons, maybe, but one of them is this: While most Americans embrace capitalism, we can be a little uneasy with someone who's very, very good at it. And Mitt Romney, at least publicly, seems to be blushing, too.

Peter St. Onge

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