13%

Yesterday in comments, Shaker Anitanola linked to this David Simon piece about Mitt Romney's 13% tax rate. I didn't have a chance to read it until this morning, but it's just great.

Can we stand back and pause a short minute to take in the spectacle of a man who wants to be President of The United States, who wants us to seriously regard him as a paragon of the American civic ideal, declaiming proudly and in public that he has paid his taxes at a third of the rate normally associated with gentlemen of his economic benefit.

Stunning.

Romney is proud of his 13% tax rate, notes Simon. He boasts about it, like it's some kind of accomplishment.

I've been thinking about that.

Even granting that there are parts of the Republican base who support miniscule tax rates (while, naturally, protesting in public squares they accessed via public roads to tell President Obama to keep his hands off their Medicare), the vast majority of them don't pay anything like a 13% tax rate. I'm not sure that bragging about already paying only 13% while hardly anyone else does works as an aspirational notion the way that, say, extraordinary wealth does.

And it's not like Romney's saying, "You, too, could pay a 13% tax rate if you elect me!" He's just belligerently asserting that he pays a shit-load of taxes—over 20%, if you count the charitable contributions that aren't taxes at all!

I think Romney genuinely has no fucking idea what average people pay. He certainly has no idea what the self-employed and fledgling entrepreneurs that he loves to hold up as the bootstrappin' job-creators of tomorrow pay. He is completely out of touch.

He doesn't understand very basic things about a country he wants to lead, because he's never had to live in it like most of us do.