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GOP Presidential Candidates Get Raw Deal From Media On Tax Returns

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This article is more than 8 years old.

Last Friday, after 5PM on the east coast, in what was clearly a summer weekend news dump, Hillary Rodham Clinton released several years of the Clinton family tax returns.

The customary parsing commenced over the weekend, with the usual amateur errors of tax analysis. One interesting nugget which emerged was the average effective tax rate (federal income tax divided by income) of the Clintons. Here is NPR's take, which was typical of the reporting:

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton released eight years worth of tax returns Friday, showing that she and her husband Bill Clinton earned $139 million since 2007. They paid nearly $44 million in federal taxes during that period. The couple's effective federal tax rate ranged from 25 percent in 2007 to 36 percent last year.

On its face, there's nothing wrong there. The quote correctly notes that the average effective federal income rate of tax for the period was between 25 and 36 percent, which one might expect from a household earning its keep from a mixture of speaker fees and book sales.

But something is missing--where's the accusation that the Clintons intentionally overpaid their taxes in the years leading up to Hillary's run? After all, that was a very consistent theme when Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush released his tax returns. Politico and others went so far as to come out and accuse Bush of doing so.

“I’m not sure why someone with [Bush’s] business interests doesn’t have more from capital gains,” said tax historian Joe Thorndike, who directs Tax Analysts’ Tax History Project, which has compiled an archive of presidential tax returns dating back to President Richard M. Nixon.

“I suspect there was some very shrewd political calculation going into this: He knew he was running for president and he knew he was planning to for some time,” he added.

What's Good for the Goose Isn't Good for the Gander?

OK, so the standard is that rich Democrats pay high tax rates because that's what the law calls for, but rich Republicans pay high tax rates because they are devious and scheming. Got it.

What about the other end? Are Republicans allowed to pay low taxes? Absolutely not. Donald Trump said this week that he pays as little as possible in taxes, and he's proud of it. The same media that accused Bush of throwing money at the Treasury willy-nilly then made the exact opposite argument against Trump. There was much pearl clutching in the media when Trump recently gave an interview to CBS News in which he said he "fights like hell" to pay as little in taxes as possible.

Let's not even get into Senator Marco Rubio's "luxury speedboat."

Even more infamous is the now-legendary trope from the 2012 cycle, "Mitt Romney's tax return." This was unacceptable to the talking class because his average effective tax rate was too low (since his income was comprised nearly entirely of capital gains and dividends).

To this day, the Mitt Romney trope is alive and well. A Google search at the time of this column's writing yields over 100,000 results.

So which one is it? Are Republicans supposed to pay a high average effective rate, and thereby be accused of maliciously overpaying their taxes in a craven political maneuver? Or are they supposed to pay a low average effective tax rate, and thereby be accused of being Ayn Rand reading heartless white guys who probably hunt Cecil the Lion's cousins for fun?

The answer is, of course, that there is no correct answer. The Republicans are screwed no matter which door they open.

Take Out the Garbage Day

How about the timing? What if one of the major presidential candidates left on the GOP side decided to release their tax returns in the dead of a Congressional recess, in the summer, on a Friday, after 5PM? Don't you think that mere act alone would elicit howls of protest from the media? Of course it would, and rightly so--such a decision proves that the campaign has something to hide. Not a word of timing protest was found in any Clinton tax return coverage that I saw.

It's high time for the media to hold Democrat candidates for president to the same high standards they hold their Republican counterparts to.