Something Doesn't Add Up

The other day when Mitt Romney was whining about how Barack Obama keeps picking on him, he said:

I just have to say, given the challenges that America faces — 23 million people out of work, Iran about to become nuclear, one out of six Americans in poverty — the fascination with taxes I paid I find to be very small-minded.

Small-minded?

• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on keeping his tax returns secret, in comparison to his father's release of 12 years of tax returns. Most other presidential candidates in the last 40 years have released five to 30 years.
• Small-minded is Mitt Romney's insistence on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, even as we were fighting two wars, and recovering from a recession that has hit the poor and middle class especially hard, while corporations have been wallowing in cash.
• Small-minded is the Republican fascination with the personal lives of gay people, and their insistence on dictating who they can marry.
• Small-minded is the majority of Republicans who insist that Obama's Hawaii birth certificate is false, that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama is a anti-colonialist born in Kenya. Apparently, 64% of Republicans are latched on to this fantasy (and still think Saddam had WMDs).

But back to Romney's tax returns: something just doesn't add up. In 2010 and 2011 Romney made $42.5 million, or $21 million a year. Estimates of Romney's wealth are between $190 and $250 million. Now, he's been "retired" since 1999, which means that he's quite probable that he's been making in the ballpark of $20 million a year for the last 12 years.

If you multiply $20 million times 12 years, you get $240 million, or Romney's current worth. What happened to the money that Romney made during the 20 or so years he worked at Bain and other jobs?

Unless Romney's got an incredibly profligate lifestyle, or made a lot of really terrible investments, there seems to be a lot of missing money. It looks like Romney's got a ton of money socked away in places we don't know about.

This is why we need to see Romney's tax returns for the last 10 years, if not 20 years. Something just does not smell right here.