Here's How Mitt Romney Might Have Paid No Taxes
August 7, 2012
by Rick Newman
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The carryover means that Romney probably claimed a much bigger loss a year or two earlier, which could easily have pushed his tax rate for 2008 or 2009 down to the low single digits. Most investors lost money in 2008, the year that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the S&P 500 stock index fell by 37 percent. Romney was probably no different.
During bad years, wealthy investors often use a legal strategy called "tax harvesting" in which they sell weak investments at a loss, which they can use to offset the tax they'd need to pay on gains from better-performing investments. The loss can be carried forward, to help lower the tax bill in later years when investments might have done better. "It's very common for sophisticated investors," says Badertscher. "It's a good time to clean out your portfolio, sell the losers, and use the losses for tax purposes." Romney has said that his investments are in a blind trust, so if his advisors made such moves, they may have done so without his input.
complete article:
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/08/07/heres-how-mitt-romney-might-have-paid-no-taxes
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