Do you care about a politician's tax returns?

Yes, I care. I want to know what kind of legal-but-shady practices (if any) they are engaged in. It does bother me if they won’t release them. I tend to think they have something to hide.

Yes, I want to know that they are paying their fair share.

I want to know how much money they are making.

I want to know that they are not paying servants under the table or doing other illegal things.

Yup. To know whether they are being hypocritical sometimes.

No. I don’t care. I regard nearly all politicians as power lusting leeches. Discussions about their tax returns are most often a red herring. I would not be surprised to learn that politicians had started speculation about their own tax returns in order to divert attention from the real bullshit that they would hate for you and me to know. Except I am pretty sure in most cases that I already know.

I care to a point. As long as they are paying their fair share and aren’t involved in tax dodges or investing in areas where there will be a conflict of interest due to their ministerial portfolio, their tax is their business. If they are acting in a way that is inappropriate for a person in their position, I do want to know about it.

They don’t have to be transparent, then again, I don’t have to vote for them.

Yes and no. I agree with @josie that they don’t give as much information as the attention paid to them would suggest and that the tax returns are often discussed at the expense of more important issues. That said, it seems to me that they are relevant for promoting transparency. A politician’s tax returns rarely provide anything even close to a major revelation. Releasing them is standard procedure, after all, and everyone knows it. The monumental hubris of the average politician aside, there is almost always some aide who makes sure during the exploratory phase that any potential campaign will not be sunk by something as basic as tax returns. But this is why refusing to release them or trying to put it off for an abnormally long time is informative in its own way.

Moreover, it makes sense to check whether people promising to manage the nation’s money effectively are capable of doing so in their own lives. These skills do not always overlap; but when candidates spend half their time insisting that their personal character traits are demonstrative of their leadership potential, it’s worth taking the time to see if their character is what they say it is. This connects to what @mazingerz88 said about hypocrisy. There’s nothing so revealing as finding out that a candidate donates money to causes quite the opposite of those he publicly supports. Again, nothing so blatant is likely to happen in the modern political climate—but that’s just one way in which the tax returns act as an early filter on just how many people run in the first place.

Not particularly.

I care about their reluctance to make the public aware of their level of income & the amount of taxes that they paid. When Romney’s father ran for public office, he made public his last 12 years of tax returns because he said that 1 or 2 years might be either low or high & he wanted people to know that he was being honest with the voters. And, unlike Mitt Romney, his father ran a very successful dealership for American Motors – he did not make his money from using invested capital to buy companies, then sell off the various successful components, then close down the rest, take a tax write-off, & throw people out of work.

no

We have had local politicians who, it was discovered, did fraudulent things with their taxes. It seems in the area that I work and live in, that’s par for the course for being a politician. Yes, I care because it speaks to the character of the person if they lie on their taxes.

I care whether they have done something illegal. If they made tons of money and barely paid any tax because they utilized legal tax shelters and write-offs, that’s fine, I don’t care about that. I don’t care how much money they make. So, I do want their taxes given for review.

I am very concerned when, it being de regiuer to release them for many years back, someone running for president refuses to follow the tradition. Romney’s own dad, when planning a run, released 12 years of returns, correctly noting that, ’‘One year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show.’’

I’m further troubled by ole Etch-a-Sketch lying about blind trusts. He claims he knows nothing because all his money is in a blind trust, overseen by the trustee. But here’s Etch-a-Sketch talking about blind trusts back when the truth wasn’t inconvenient.