Taxes

I've kind of ignored the kerfluffle over Mitt Romney's tax returns, but after catching up on Larry Correia's blog yesterday and reading his post on the issue, I decided to do a little digging.

Of course, most of my blog readers are well aware that Democrats only claim to care more about the poor.  (I'm going to do some more ranting on that in the near future, by the way.)  When you crunch the numbers, a different picture is shown.

Here it is in black and white.  For once, I'll provide links to my sources at the end; the info came from two different articles.

All this info is from 2010.

Barack Obama made $1,728,096
Mitt Romney made $21,700,000

Barack Obama paid $453,770 in federal taxes--26% of his income
Mitt Romney paid $3,000,000 in federal taxes--14% of his income

Another way to look at that is that Mitt Romney paid nearly twice as much in taxes last year as President Obama made.

Barack Obama contributed $245,075 to charity*--14% of his income
Mitt Romney contributed $2,980,000 to charity--14% of his income

Now, it's worth noting that the men were equally charitable as a percentage of their income.  What I find interesting, however, is the ratio of taxes to charitable donations.  President Obama constantly talks about how the rich don't pay their fair share.**  Progressives repeat, as though it were mantra, the line that Republicans hate "the least of these" because we don't like the idea of giving the government more of our money.  Mitt Romney essentially doubled the burden on himself specifically to aid those in need.  That's not something many people can say.


*I actually think it's kind of cool that the biggest beneficiary was Fisher House.
**The Romneys paid $3,000,000 in taxes last year.  We paid $0.  Tell me again why he should be morally obligated to pay yet more?


(Obama's info)
(Romney's info)