All of their actions support this explicitly stated goal — why on Earth would ANYBODY expect them to do anything different?

But, even if you do not compare two states – what you see is that while the country has improved very slowly, NJ got worse.

Many of the individuals who entered into these transactions had little understanding of either how the transaction worked or the risks involved. It probably should have occurred to them that the deal was too good to be true. But I can’t get too personally angry when someone receives an opinion letter from one of the largest law firms in the country, has his tax returns filled out by one of the big 4 accounting firms, and has one of the largest banks in the country create the options. Especially since the IRS cracked down big time and the people who entered the transactions paid more than they would have owed if they had just paid the tax on the gain in the first place.

Every time I hear a Republican whine about Obama’s deficit spending, II need to remind people of that simple face.

As to Christie, I think you should look at his record – not his words.
Here is a comparison I wrote on DU awhile ago –

Christie has NOT helped NJ’s economy, he has hurt it. During his time in office, NJ has done LESS well in recovering than the nation as a whole. A fair test of how he is doing would be to compare NJ with a similar Democratically led state.

NJ is an affluent state with an abundance of jobs in R&D and in Finance. It is also a state where high school kids are among the top performing in the country. It also has a significant number of older urban centers that were once successful cities. Another state that could be described similarly is MA.

Since Governor Christie was elected in 2009, you can think of these two states as if they were testing the republican and the Democratic economic solutions. The unemployment rates are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

December 2009 (a month after Christie was elected – as a baseline): NJ – 10.0 MA – 9.3
December 2010 : NJ – 9.1 MA – 8.2 (Note, at least in NJ, the budget was passed in the fall of the previous year – so this year is not yet affected much by Governor Christie. MA and NJ are moving pretty much in sync – though MA is doing slightly better.)
May 2011: : NJ- 9.4 MA – 7.6 (This year it is a Christie budget and Christie is in charge – and while MA continues to improve, NJ gets somewhat worse.)
December 2011 – the most recent I can find – NJ 9.1 and MA 6.9.

There is NO way to look at these numbers in Christie’s favor. It is often said that the states can be laboratories for federal policy, in this case, I really think before Scott Brown supports policies like Christie’s, he should look at the results.

The more current numbers are 9.4 in NJ (the fifth worst in the country) and 6.0 in MA.

In addition, Christie has a LOT of baggage and was so unlikable that in his only previous elected office, in the most Republican County (Morris) he did not win reelection because the other Republican freeholders found someone else and ran as a ticket because they disliked Christie so much.

It is strange that you use his morbid obesity to nickname him “the human bulldozer”.

Definitely fighting dirty. But I tolerate it more than I do other dirty fighting maneuvers because it is so obviously a low blow, and obviously delivered with the gleeful knowledge that the only things Romney can do about is are (i) whine; or (ii) release the returns.

The only VP I would go all in with Romney is if he picks the human bulldozer. That would be Chris Christie.

During Romney’s tenure as a Marriott director, the company repeatedly utilized complex tax-avoidance maneuvers, prompting at least two tangles with the Internal Revenue Service, records show. In 1994, while he headed the audit committee, Marriott used a tax shelter known to attorneys by its nickname: “Son of BOSS.”

A federal appeals court invalidated the maneuver in a 2009 ruling, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice, which called Marriott’s transaction and attempted tax benefits “fictitious,” “artificial,” “spectral,” an “illusion” and a “scheme.” Marriott had argued the plan predated government efforts to close such shelters.

Employing another strategy, Marriott legally avoided hundreds of millions of dollars in income taxes thanks to a federal tax-credit program criticized and allowed to expire by Congress. Marriott has also shifted profits to a Luxembourg shell company. During Romney’s years on the board, Marriott’s effective tax rate dipped as low as 6.8 percent, compared with the federal corporate statutory rate of 35 percent.

It seems we are seeing yet another Mitt Romney emerge — flim-flam man

President Obama’s reelection campaign repeated its call for Mitt Romney to release additional tax returns Thursday, citing renewed interest in a tax shelter used by the Marriott hotel chain when Romney chaired the company’s audit committee in the 1990s.

In an op-ed published Wednesday by CNN, Peter C. Canellos, former chair of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section, and Edward D. Kleinbard, former chief of staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation, described Romney as “an executive who was willing to go to the edge, if not beyond, to bend the rules to seek an unfair advantage.”

Canellos donated $2,300 to Obama in 2008.

He and Kleinbard noted that a federal appeals court ruled in 2009 that Marriott used “fictitious” losses to artificially reduce its taxable income during the period when Romney led the audit committee charged with ensuring tax code compliance. The scheme was known as “Son of BOSS.”

http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2012/08/09/president-obama-campaign-repeats-call-for-more-mitt-romney-tax-returns-citing-tax-shelter-used-marriott-when-romney-was-board/oXkbpYDEbE1kdJvyGgGzSJ/story.html

“Underhanded”? Perhaps. I think we agree that most voters reject this kind of behavior in a presidential candidate. More importantly, in my view most voters will conclude that the very fact that this skullduggery is legal is as bad or worse than the acts themselves.

Mitt Romney’s tax returns are likely to reinforce the already devastating critique of the GOP policies that the left has been hammering all along: that current tax policy is heavily biased to benefit the already-wealthy, and the GOP will if elected make them even more so.

In the real world, it ain’t leave no business behind (except alternative energy companies). Cant just borrow from the Bank of China and rack up a $5 Trillion dollar tab.

Romney shows no great greed for knowledge, an upward surge for mankind, love, or anything other than profits.

Treating the USA as a malfunctioning corporation is not a sensible thing to do – and in Romney’s case – though he spoke of self deportation for those illegally here – he can’t fire everyone from the USA or suck off all the assets and then declare the USA bankrupt.

You lie so often, about so much, you’re beginning to believe your own lies.
No wonder you’re a Republican.

Not that it matters in all the media and campaign clutter, but this is a tempest in a teapot, for the following reasons:

The defendant in the Massachusetts iteration of the case was a Democratic Administration.

Despite fantasies port and starboard, a surprising number of motor-voter registrees actually vote Republican in final elections.

In a related matter, the City of Boston mails registration forms to adults not on the voter list, but enumerated on the (Constitutionally-mandated) City Census. I know of no legislative or municipal incumbent that is losing sleep over the matter.

“But does the transaction work? Of course, the answer is clearly no; otherwise, no one would ever pay a dime in capital gains taxes”

“courts have been hostile to taxpayer arguments that the son of Boss transaction worked. The courts used the economic substance doctrine to rule in favor of IRS, noting that transactions with little if any economic loss cannot generate huge tax losses – it just cannot happen under the tax law.”

“The courts used the economic substance doctrine to rule in favor of IRS, noting that transactions with little if any economic loss cannot generate huge tax losses – it just cannot happen under the tax law.”

Most tax shelters are simply tax deferrals, the IRS rarely is fooled for long and when a true “loophole” exists they close it down quickly in the courts.
The IRS gets it’s money in the end. Aside from the complexity of some tax shelter schemes, the rules are pretty simple and profits generate tax liabilities. Deferring taxes is usually done to offset short periods of extremely high profits, to average the liabilities over a longer period of time. 10 million this year and zero for the next 9 years, average the 10 mil over the 10 years and pay a more reasonable rate. All profits are taxed eventually.

After it had been reported in 2006 that Rezko was under federal investigation for influence-peddling, Obama purchased a 10 foot (3.0 m) wide strip of Ms. Rezko’s property for $104,500, $60,000 above the assessed value.[7][34] According to Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Mark Brown, “Rezko definitely did Obama a favor by selling him the 10-foot strip of land, making his own parcel less attractive for development.”[37] Obama acknowledges that the exchange may have created the appearance of impropriety, and stated “I consider this a mistake on my part and I regret it.”[36]

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

I doubt that the actual planning method used was illegal; legal methods of tax avoidance work just fine. But the legality of the method would not alter the public perception of it.

The rest of us can only hope that such perversions remain a minority view.

You can go deeper and say he does not know how to be a statesman. I realize that being diplomatic can be related to personality or genuine respect for others and that that works better, it likely is true that people without those characteristics – like Romney – could learn rules to follow that would at least give the appearance of statesmanship.

But I suspect that the key to being President is how one works with others. I doubt any man or woman could be expert on every issue that will face a President. The question is how well he does heading a group to look at alternatives and then act.

Because of this, an agreement with the basic values of the nominee, character, and their ability to sell the agreed upon solutions may matter more than detailed knowledge – especially in how to – at minimum – go to the edge of legality for greedy personal gain.

After reading the link, is there anything Romney doesn’t know? Seems like an expert in everything, man has drive.

Pieces such as this point the way towards the most likely explanation — Mitt Romney carefully structured his financial affairs to earn and keep a boatload of money, and used tactics that were both absolutely legal and absolutely abhorrent to most voters.

We’ve only seen the beginning of this, it’s still early August.