of what is is wrong in America.
What I post below was drafted - and posted - as a comment on another diary.
I place it here, entirely above the fold, as its own entry so that perhaps a few more may see it, and offer their responses.
Here it is:
I am going to posit for sake of discussion that for any year in question Romney paid at least $1,000,000 in federal taxes. He can legitimately be characterized as a "substantial" amount.
Yet given what we know of Romney's assets and what we can therefore project about his income, that could represent an effective tax rate of less than 5% and almost certainly less than 10%.
Given that those whose income is solely from wages pay payroll taxes, which prior to the Obama administration, had been for a number of years at a rate or 7.65%, any rate lower than this means that Romney was paying total federal taxes at a rate lower than all except the poorest of the poor - those who were able to take an earned income tax credit, thus lowering their effective rate below what they had deducted from their wages.
There is one other point. For all the bloviating of some Republicans who say Romney should release his returns, in reality they do NOT want that to happen, nor do many very wealthy Democrats who make their money from carried interest. The real scandal is not people cheating on taxes, but what avoidance strategies are legal and available to the likes of Romney and the hedge fund operators.
Close those loopholes.
Raise the cap on wages subject to payroll taxes.
Include benefit such as stock options as subject to payroll taxes.
Then there is, despite the likes of Chuck Schumer (who is very protective of the financial sector), no reason to argue that medicare and medicaid are contributing to the deficit in a major way. In fact, we could increase benefits - such as the reimbursement rate - and perhaps lower the age of eligibility for both Social Security and Medicare, which would break some of the employment logjam - and not contribute to the deficit.
We have too many people, of whom Romney is a telling exemplar, who are not contributing back to the well-being of the vast majority of people in this nation.
And remember - Romney and hedge fund operators do NOT contribute to the economic well-being. They do NOT create well=paying jobs. They take money for their benefit, at low and/or subsidized tax rates, without truly benefiting either most Americans or American society as a whole. They are predators, they are vulture capitalists as Rick Perry rightly noted. They are selfish bastards.
If the American people truly understood this, you might see an uprising that would dwarf Shays' Rebellion.
Such an uprising is long overdue.