Romney: I pay “closer to the 15 percent range” in tax (VIDEO)

Mitt Romney on Tuesday said to reporters that his income, the majority of which comes from investment dividends, is likely taxed at around 15 percent, setting up an angle for Democratic attack just a day after he hedged on releasing his tax returns in a South Carolina debate.

Watch here:

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports, this information will be a boon to Democrats who are already gearing up to make the 2012 elections about income and tax fairness:

At a time when the 2012 presidential election is expected to focus heavily on tax fairness, the GOP is set to nominate someone who is worth as much as $250 million, but pays a lower tax rate than many middle class taxpayers.

In 2010 the average American household income was, when adjusted for inflation, at a lower level than it was ten years earlier, echoing Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s, The Economist reported. 

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, released a set of statistics contrasting Romney’s tax plan with that of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. Among the most striking: “the tax cuts that Romney is proposing for the top 1 percent of Americans are bigger than the tax cuts he is proposing for the other 99 percent combined.”

The report continued: “In fact, the additional Romney tax cuts are more heavily skewed toward the top 1 percent than the Bush tax cuts.”