Yesterday Romney admitted he pays around 15 percent in taxes:
Romney said that he gets "speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much." Not very much turns out to be over $360,000 in the last year. Allahpundit sighs:
I don’t understand how he isn’t more attuned to his own rhetoric when talking about wealth. He knows the left is going to demagogue him for it; in virtually every other aspect of the campaign, he’s exhaustively prepared and disciplined. His critics were unfair in knocking him for saying he likes being able to fire people, but he has to realize that talking about “firing” anyone, in whatever context, is going to get their attention as part of an attack on Bain’s layoffs. Same here: Obviously he was speaking relatively when he said he doesn’t earn “much” from speaking fees, but even in that context, the takeaway is, “How much must this guy earn that $360,000 a year qualifies as ‘not very much’?”
Suzy Khimm explains how Romney pays so little in taxes:
Ultimately, the private-equity tax loophole could become far more controversial than whether private-equity deals destroy or create jobs. Today, even the Wall Street Journal came out against the loophole, arguing that capital gains should benefit those actually receiving a return on an investment rather than labor. “It is difficult to defend the fact that private-equity and hedge-fund executives pay no more than 15% on their share of their partnership’s profits because it is considered a capital gain,” writes Francesco Guerrera, editor of the Journal’s Money & Investing section. “If it looks like income and smells like income, it should be taxed like income—at much higher rates.”
Greg Sargent expects the Democrats to hammer Romney over this taxes:
The bad economy is obviously a huge liability for Obama. But it remains possible that it is inflating the poll strength of opponents like Romney, because respondents are picking the alternative to Obama before getting to know him better, a state of affairs that could change once Romney’s record and biography are better understood by voters. It’s also possible that Romney’s potential weaknesses as a general election candidate are getting papered over by the far worse weaknesses of his GOP rivals. This is why conservatives like Erick Erickson predict that despite current perceptions, Romney will ultimately prove a “disastrous general election candidate.”
And Frum argues that problems with capital gains taxes should simply be fixed and not cited "as justification for re-electing the president who also failed to fix them."
The Dish 