Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

Mitt Romney speaking at a campaign fundraising event at the Red Rock Hotel and Casino Friday in Las Vegas.

There you have it…Mitt Romney released his tax returns. Well, at least the ones for 2011, as he previously vowed to do. Mitt Romney’s trustee released this statement.  One paragraph in particular has caught the eye of many Romney tax return junkies:

The Romneys donated $4,020,772 to charity in 2011, amounting to nearly 30% of their income.

The Romneys claimed a deduction for $2.25 million of those charitable contributions.

The Romneys’ generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor's statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years.

Well that seems nice that they paid more taxes than they owed, right? Well there is one slight problem. In July, Romney told ABC News, "I don't pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don't think I'd be qualified to become president. I'd think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires."

Once again, look at this quote in today's statement by Romney's trustee, "The Romneys' generous charitable donations in 2011 would have significantly reduced their tax obligation for the year. The Romneys thus limited their deduction of charitable contributions to conform to the Governor's statement in August, based upon the January estimate of income, that he paid at least 13% in income taxes in each of the last 10 years."

The video editing machines in Chicago must be on fire right about now.

Talking Points Memo Brian Beutler has even gone further by actually calculating what Mitt Romney’s effective tax rate would be if he did deduct all of his charitable contributions:

Romney’s 14.1 percent effective federal tax rate in 2011 would’ve been lower if he’d deducted all of his charitable contributions from his nearly $13.7 million in income. But after estimating that he paid at least 13 percent of his income in taxes in each of the last 10 years, Romney opted not to deduct nearly $1.8 million worth of charitable contributions last year to artificially lift his tax liability.

So what would Romney’s effective tax rate have been if he’d deducted all of his charitable donations? About 12.2 percent.

Here’s the math we used, validated by tax experts at the liberal Center for American Progress.

According to the campaign, Romney earned $13,696,951 in 2011, of which he paid $1,935,708 in taxes.

But those figures include $1,770,772 in charitable contributions that he could have deducted, but chose not to. Since the campaign acknowledges that nearly all of Romney’s income came from investments, we assume he paid a 15 percent rate on that $1,770,772 — or $265,615.80 in taxes that he didn’t have to pay.

If you subtract that figure from his total taxes, you’re left with $1,670,092.20 — the amount of tax he would have paid if he’d deducted all of his charitable contributions.

And that’s 12.2 percent of his overall income.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Mitt Romney (file)

The Washington Post offered real insight into the Romney camp's thinking on the economy today. Kevin Hassett and Glenn Hubbard, both economic advisers to Romney penned today's op-ed, "Obama inconsistent on pace of economic recovery." Here's taste:

President Obama’s principal economic argument for reelection now appears to be that he has an excuse for the U.S. economy’s extremely weak recovery from the deep recession of 2007 to 2009: that recoveries after financial crises are always slow. The president said in Ohio in June, in language that has been echoed by his surrogates, that “this was not your normal recession. Throughout history, it has typically taken countries up to 10 years to recover from financial crises of this magnitude."

In other words, according to the excuse narrative, even though the Obama stimulus was brilliant and timely, it could not deliver a normal recovery because the financial crisis made that impossible.

What really sticks out their understanding and approach regarding the stimulus. In his analysis on Hassett and Hubbard's conclusions, the always wonktastic Ezra Klein argued what failed to yield a better recovery isn't the stimulus — it was the lack of stimulus. He writes:

The first part of the op-ed reprises the argument from an earlier paper Hasset and Hubbard released on behalf of the Romney campaign: While financial crises might lead to slow recoveries internationally, they don’t lead to slow recoveries in the United States. Again, the citation goes to ”an extensive study of recessions in the United States” by Michael Bordo of Rutgers University and Joseph Haubrich of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, which found that the recovery from this recession has been unusually slow.

As in the original paper, Romney’s economists blames this on the Obama administration’s economic policies. And, also like in the original paper, they omit what Bordo says when you ask him about the study, which is that this recession was unusually long because it was driven by a housing collapse.

Also of note, Romney's economic advisers never take the president to task for the one thing they absolutely could: the housing crisis. The slow recovery of the real estate market is what has made this recovery so different than the ones in the past. The Obama administration has been criticized for not giving enough support to underwater borrowers. 

Proponents of breaking up the big banks found themselves a very unlikely ally today, Sandy Weill. He is the former CEO and Chairman of Citigroup, one of the conglomerates once deemed "too big to fail." More importantly, Weill is considered to have had one of the biggest hands in repealing Glass Steagall in 1999.

Let's start with the facts. Glass-Steagall refers to the Banking Act of 1933. It essentially protected those who deposited their money in a bank from getting hit by a failing risky bet by a securities firm. Essentially, Bank of America wouldn't be allowed to take your savings and invest it into their investment banking unit. When Glass Stegall was repealed you saw the creation of mega banks that had both a consumer bank arm and an investment banking arm. This allowed banks to muddle the investments they made on securities — like the ill-fated mortgage backed securities — and the bank deposits made by main street. I think we all now know how this worked out...

On Wednesday, Weill told CNBC’s Squawk Box, "What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail." 

Now he tells us. Better late than never?

Weill isn’t the only former banking big wig to call for a breakup of the big banks. Weill now joins a chorus of former bank execs, John Reed and Dick Parsons from Citigroup and Philip Purcell from Morgan Stanley. We shall see if anyone in Washington is listening.