Tax Face-Off: Romney vs. Me

By TIMOTHY EGAN
NYT

Timothy Egan

Stubbornly, perversely, stupidly, I insist on doing my own taxes every year. I don’t cut my own hair. I don’t pickle backyard cabbage or home-school my kids. But I plow ahead with this most direct act of citizenship for one reason: if you want to understand power and influence in this country, you have to be familiar with the tax code.

My friends say I’m a moron, missing out on key loopholes. They invoke the old saying that he who has himself for a lawyer (or accountant) has a fool for a client. Stipulated. On to the returns:

This year, I did my 1040 and its attendant nightmare forms while comparing my family’s financial documents with those of Willard M. Romney’s. He paid 13.9 percent in taxes on income of $21.7 million for 2010 and about the same rate for the not fully completed 2011 returns.

I’m going to pay double Romney’s rate on a mere fraction of his income. But you won’t get any class-war envy from me about a man worth upward of $250 million paying the same rate as someone earning, say, $55,000 a year. Nope. There’s a larger point here than the inequality one, compelling though it is.

(More here.)