Mitt Romney is Doing Pretty Well For Himself

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Mitt Romney has released his two most recent tax returns:

Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year — virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments.

That’s pretty impressive. Not the fact that Romney paid a 13.9% tax rate on this haul — we already pretty much knew that. No, I’m talking about the fact that he made $21 million each year. Most public reports put Romney’s wealth in the neighborhood of $250 million, which means he got a return of about 8.4% both years. That’s a real return of around 7% during a generally slow-growth period when most people are scrounging around just to find safe investments that pay a point or two more than treasuries. When it comes to managing big pots of money, it looks like Romney hasn’t lost his old magic.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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