It was bad enough when it came out that Mitt Romney had off-shored money in the Grand Caymans which reeks of crooked businessman/mobster/evil genius who will eventually blow up the world with a laser from a space-based platform unless his demands are met (and let’s not put that past Mitt just yet). But this…. this will not, as they say, play well in Peoria:

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax records on Tuesday indicating he will pay $6.2 million (3.9 million pounds) in taxes on a total of $45.2 million in income over the years 2010 and 2011.

Bowing to increasing political pressure to provide more detail about his vast wealth, the former private equity executive released tax returns indicating he and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. They expect to pay a 15.4 percent rate when they file their returns for 2011.

Romney’s tax rate is below that of most wage-earning Americans because most of his income, as outlined in more than 500 pages of tax documents, flows from capital gains on investments.

Under the U.S. tax code, capital gains are taxed at 15 percent, compared with a top tax rate of 35 percent for wage earners.

[...]

Romney’s campaign officials stressed that his tax rate is based mostly on income from investments that are held in a blind trust. Romney’s holdings include an undisclosed amount in funds based in the Grand Cayman Islands and other overseas entities.

Romney advisers stressed that the holdings in the Caymans — along with those in a Swiss bank account that was closed in 2010 after an investment adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney — were reported on tax returns and were not vehicles to avoid taxes.

Uh, no duh. Someone had to tell him that? Really?

And that is what we know from  the 2010 & 2011 tax returns only. It’s likely that his tax returns for the preceding ten years or so are boxed up and stashed away in a safe somewhere with the warning “Here be dragons” Sharpied on the boxtop.