Today Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns. As soon as he did the right started going on about how much he gives to charity. Here’s The Washington Times:
Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is releasing a brief summary of 20 years of tax returns on Friday, and his accountant says it will show he gave 13.45 percent of his adjusted gross income to charities.
That’s nearly twice the rate of President Obama, who according to his tax returns from 2000 through 2011 donated just less than 7 percent of his adjusted gross income to charities.
Mr. Romney’s campaign did not release his returns, but instead had his trustee, Brad Malt, write a blog post giving some details of returns from 1990 through 2009.
But what are those donations? That’s what we don’t know.
Well there is one that we do, somewhat know about; his church. The Mormon church requires its members to donate a certain percentage of their income back to the church. Tithing, as it is called, is a somewhat secret part of Mormonism. No one really knows exactly what the requirement is, but it appears to be at least 10% of your income. When you consider that the Mormon church earns an estimated $7 billion a year from this, it leads you to believe many must give more.
So let’s go with that 10% that Romney MUST give per his religion and deduct that from his 13.45% that he gave total. That leaves us with Romney giving 3.45%, or a little more than half of what the Obama’s gave.
Now I’m not downing the Mormon Church or even Romney’s givings here. I’m just pointing out that there is a difference of giving through free will and being forced to give by your religion. That’s something The Washington Times fails to mention. So if you take the forced giving out of this equation, then you are left seeing that the Obama’s are by far much more charitable, especially given the wealth gap between the two.
But this is logic and we’re dealing with Republicans, so logic and fact are non-existent. They want us to believe Romney is a modern day Robin Hood, when in fact he is more of a modern day Scrooge. Just remember, Robin Hood wouldn’t throw 47% of the people, which are suffering, under the bus.