We now know that over the past two years, Mitt Romney has earned $42.6 million, mostly from investment income, paid $6.2 million in taxes and donated about $7 million to charity. By all accounts, he paid what he owed under the law. Though I have not had a chance to digest the more than 500 pages of documents the campaign has provided (which you can view here), my initial take is puzzlement that Romney didn’t simply do this long ago to get the issue out of the way, because he has absolutely nothing to apologize for.

Liberals have seized on the fact that his effective tax rate was 13.9 percent in 2010 and estimated at 15.4 percent for 2011. The reason is that he earned most of his money from investments held in blind trusts, which is taxed at a lower rate of 15 percent. However, the capital gains tax rate takes into account the fact that income earned by investments is already subjected to a 35 percent corporate tax rate. If companies didn’t have to pay that tax, then profits would be larger and investors would make more money that would be subject to taxation.