Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

On Friday afternoon, the Romney campaign released the candidate’s 2011 tax return, which showed that he paid a tax rate of approximately 14 percent on more than $13 million of reported income. The campaign also disclosed that Romney voluntarily forfeited about $1.8 million in charitable deductions to inflate the tax rate he would have to disclose to the public. The campaign continues to refuse to release returns prior to 2010, flunking an accepted standard of transparency, first established by Mitt’s father George Romney, of releasing multiple years’ returns.

In a blog post, Romney’s lawyer and the trustee of his “blind trust” said, “After you have reviewed all of the newly-posted documents, you may have further questions.” Yes, we do. Lots.

Here are 10 unanswered questions about Romney’s taxes:

1. After the election, when the subject of your tax returns is outside of the public glare, will you file an amended tax return to claim your full deduction of charitable contributions? Was the tax rate you reported for other years similarly manipulated?

2. Why was your 2011 income $7 million lower than you estimated it to be in January? How does someone overestimate their income by $7 million?

3. Financial disclosures show that you have as much as $82 million in your tax-deferred Individual Retirement Account, despite the fact that tax rules limited contributions into such accounts to $30,000 per year. Did you lowball the value of the assets you put into your IRA, as tax experts suspect? And did you do the same with gifts into your sons’ trusts?

4. What was the purpose of your Swiss bank account and the myriad offshore entities shown on your return, based in countries like the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, if not to avoid taxes?

5. Can you explain what one tax expert has called a “mysterious one-time infusion of foreign tax credits” in 2008?

6. You have not disclosed any foreign bank account reports (FBARs). Did you file all FBARs on all of your offshore accounts with the Treasury Department by the legal deadlines each year?

7. You claim to have paid an average tax rate of 20 percent over the last 20 years based on a flawed calculation. What was your real tax rate?

8. Your 14 percent tax rate –- not to mention the approximately 10 percent tax rate you would have paid had you not inflated it — is less than what many middle-class Americans pay. And you paid just 0.2% of your income in payroll taxes, while most Americans pay about 15%. Do you think that is fair?

9. Your tax returns show that the Marriott Corporation paid you $260,390 in directors’ fees in 2011. When you were the company’s audit committee chair in the 1990s, were you aware that the company was abusing a notorious illegal tax shelter?

10. You say you’ve made a “commitment to the public” that your tax rate should not be below 13 percent. If you believe that the richest Americans shouldn’t be paying an exceptionally low tax rate, why don’t you support President Obama’s “Buffett Rule”?

Romney’s lack of transparency on his tax returns is especially troubling given that he is similarly evasive on the details of his tax policies. From what we know about his tax plan, Romney would shower massive tax breaks on the wealthiest Americans, which means that it can only adds up with a major middle-class tax hike. How much will Romney raise your taxes in order to cut taxes for people like him? That’s the biggest unanswered question of all.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has proposed raising the prices of federally-insured mortgages in states that have attempted to make it harder for banks to foreclose on homeowners. Under the proposal, lenders in five states will have to pay more to originate mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the costs will likely be passed on to borrowers, the Financial Times reports:

Lenders originating new loans in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida and Connecticut will be forced to pay US-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac up to 30 basis points extra for their credit guarantee, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said in its proposal.

The fee would probably be passed on to borrowers. The agency said the surcharge would compensate for the increased cost of repossessing homes in the five states, costs ultimately borne by US taxpayers.

The FHFA argues that the policy is necessary to keep homeowners in other states from subsidizing homeowners in those five, as cost discrepancies occur when the foreclosure process is slowed down.

The decision, though, ignores why those five states slowed down the foreclosure process. Speedy foreclosure processes make it easier for lenders to use robo-signers that lead to fraudulent documentation, to the dual-tracking practice that caused foreclosures on homeowners actively seeking loan modifications, or to lenders making mistakes and foreclosing on the wrong homes.

Slowing down the process makes it easier to prevent fraud, catch those mistakes, and hold banks and lenders accountable. But thanks to the new FHFA policy, the incentive will again be to make the foreclosure process as fast as possible, as FireDogLake’s David Dayen explained.

“So the federal conservator of Fannie and Freddie wants to put its thumbs on the scale in favor of faster foreclosures and diminished due process,” Dayen wrote. “FHFA wants to be able to foreclose on lenders…without concern for whether the documents are legitimate, without concern for whether the bank and the borrower can come to a resolution on a modification.”

The United States is approaching the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of 2012, when a set of policies enacted by the debt deal reached in August 2011 will go into effect. In addition to massive spending cuts, several tax provisions will expire, including the full Bush tax cuts.

Though both the GOP and Democrats agree that the low-end Bush tax cuts, those that give everyone a tax cut but primarily affect the middle class, need to be extended, Republicans have blocked that in order to leverage an extension of the upper-income tax cuts. The logic, Republicans argue, is that not doing so will raise taxes on “job creators” at a time when the economy can least afford it.

An analysis of the fiscal cliff policies by the Economic Policy Institute, however, found that the cost of the Bush tax cuts — and particularly those for high-income earners — far outweigh the benefits:

EPI’s analysis found that letting the entire Bush tax cuts package expire would cause “just over one-third” of the damage of letting the stimulus measures (primarily made up of the payroll tax cut and other middle class tax cuts) expire and less than half the damage of the spending cuts. The high-end Bush tax cuts, as the chart shows, account for 7.3 percent of the cost of the fiscal cliff policies but just 2.3 percent of the economic benefit, meaning their expiration would save a substantial sum of money with a negligible effect on economic growth.

The findings are similar to an earlier report from the Congressional Budget Office that found the expiration of the high-income Bush tax cuts, once multipliers are added, would cause far less economic damage than spending cuts to the discretionary budget favored by Republicans.

Former Minnesota Governor and unsuccessful presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty announced yesterday that he was stepping down as co-chairman of the Romney campaign in order to take over the top spot at the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents the largest financial services companies in the country. Pawlenty assumed the role as a top bank lobbyist despite his tough words for Wall Street during his campaign.

As head of the FSR, one of Pawlenty’s key roles will be helping banks water down the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. And he got started during his first press conference by calling for banks to do more self-regulation, choosing “voluntarily” to stop doing “stupid things”:

In his first press conference since being named head of the Financial Services Roundtable, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said he would seek a “refinement” of the Dodd-Frank Act, but also added that banks need to do more to regulate themselves.

The one-time Republican presidential hopeful, who is stepping down as co-chair of Mitt Romney’s campaign, said he was asked while interviewing for the Roundtable job about how financial institutions can regain the public’s trust.

“I said, ‘Stop doing stupid things,’” Pawlenty said while sitting in the Roundtable’s Washington offices.

“These are large organizations with tens of thousands of employees in many cases. There is always going to be some individual doing something that’s off track. That’s human nature. But the obligation and the opportunity of the organizations is to put controls in place and a culture in place that minimizes the likelihood of that, but does it voluntarily.”

Of course, the anticipation that banks would self-regulate — rendering federal regulations unnecessary — was part of what caused the financial crisis in 2008. Romney has pledged to repeal the Dodd-Frank law.

The Senate panel responsible for probing the $9 billion “London Whale” trading loss that shook JP Morgan Chase earlier this year will release its findings before the end of the year and will call for a stronger Volcker Rule, sources told Bloomberg. The rule is a piece of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that bans taxpayer-backed banks from certain types of risky trades.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin (D), who chairs the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said at the time of the loss that the draft version of the Volcker Rule had a loophole so large “a Mack truck could drive right through it.” Now, according to Bloomberg, he and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) will push regulators to close loopholes in the rule and strengthen it to prevent trades like the London Whale loss, which could have caused larger market problems at smaller or more vulnerable banks.

At the same time, some Republican senators are still pushing to further weaken the rule, which was watered down so much by bank lobbyists and Republicans that its namesake, former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, said he didn’t like it.

Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown (R) cast the deciding vote for the Dodd-Frank law, but not before he successfully weakened the Volcker Rule by inserting certain exemptions for big banks. Since then, Brown has continued to lobby regulators to take even more teeth out of the rule. Brown’s efforts amount to “significant loosening of the regulations and [are] absolutely serving the interests of people who do not want to have meaningful reform,” according to Simon Johnson, and MIT professor and reform advocate.

As ThinkProgress has noted, the “47 percent” that Mitt Romney derided for paying no federal income tax, and thus taking no “personal responsibility and care for their lives,” actually pay a slew of other taxes at rates higher than Romney himself pays. The lion’s share of the tax breaks handed out by the U.S. don’t go to low-income households or the middle class, but to the rich.

And according to a new report from the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, things are even worse at the state and local level level. In fact, all 50 states impose higher tax rates on low-income households than their richest 1 percent, when state and local taxes are taken into account:

The fact is that nearly every state and local tax system takes a much greater share of income from middle- and low-income families than from the wealthy. This “tax the poor” strategy is problematic because hiking taxes on low-income families pushes them further into poverty and increases the likelihood that they will need to rely on safety net programs. From a state budgeting perspective, this “soak the poor” strategy also doesn’t yield much revenue compared to modest taxes on the rich. It’s no wonder that so many states with regressive tax structures are facing long-term structural budget deficits. They‘re continually imposing higher taxes on people without much money.

Some of the worst offenders are Florida, where the top 1 percent pays a 2.1 percent tax rate while the bottom 20 percent of households pay 13.5 percent; Illinois, 4.1 percent and 13 percent, respectively; Nevada, 1.6 percent and 8.9 percent, respectively; Texas, 3 percent and 12.2 percent, respectively; and South Dakota, 1.9 percent and 11 percent, respectively. Washington state though, is the worst, where the richest 1 percent pay a 2.6 percent tax rate while the poorest 20 percent pay a whopping 17 percent in taxes.

In the entire U.S., only the District of Columbia charges the richest 1 percent a higher tax rate than the poorest 20 percent, according to the report.