TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Megan McArdle takes a look through Romney’s tax returns:

Romney still has a low effective tax rate, because he has a lot of capital income, and donates a lot of money to charity.  You can argue over whether we should tax capital gains more highly (I favor eliminating the corporate income tax and then taxing capital income at ordinary income tax rates, but Matt Yglesias makes the “No” case here).  You can rail at the existence of charitable deductions, a question on which I can see both sides.  But this is the source of his low income tax rate.  There’s no ultra-sophisticated nefarious scheme, or at least, not one that’s readily visible on his tax returns.  Early in his life, Romney deferred a lot of consumption by saving, in part undoubtedly because his large income made doing so rather painless.   Fair or not, that’s tax advantaged behavior in every modern economy that I’m aware of.  

Romney did something that Warren Tax-Me-More Buffet has never done, but has always had the option to: he paid the federal government more in taxes than he is required to according to the tax code.

Criticizing a 15% capital gains tax rate is fine. Assailing someone’s character because they only paid what the federal government requires is not.