dajafi wrote:

cshort wrote:He's worked a hell of a lot more than Obama did.

In what sense?

cshort wrote:

dajafi wrote:

cshort wrote:He's worked a hell of a lot more than Obama did.

In what sense?

Analyzing financial statements for failing companies, developing strategies to turn around companies, negotiate contracts, turning around the Olympics, governing a state, management consulting. I know its not community organization ......

cshort wrote:

dajafi wrote:

cshort wrote:He's worked a hell of a lot more than Obama did.

In what sense?

Analyzing financial statements for failing companies, developing strategies to turn around companies, negotiate contracts, turning around the Olympics, governing a state, management consulting.....

cshort wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:It's hard to say with Mitt because he's not really one of us. He's one of them. He's one of those people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth and spend much of their lives patting themselves on the back for it. He doesn't come from the working class. He's a blue blood.

For instance his schooling as a child, public grade school, then prep school, was a lot different from Obama. Oh wait, it's the same. He's worked a hell of a lot more than Obama did.

I like Wayne Root's idea for both of them. Romney show's his taxes, Obama releases his college files. Shuts everyone up.

dajafi wrote:

cshort wrote:He's worked a hell of a lot more than Obama did.

In what sense?

jerseyhoya wrote:Really the only reason you would think Romney did more work than Obama is if you were a racist who thinks black people are lazy

The Dude wrote:pac, the answer was asked, answered, and over, before you brought race into it

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Really the only reason you would think Romney did more work than Obama is if you were a racist who thinks black people are lazy

My point, one I'm actually guessing you would agree with, is that the question of who's worked more or who worked harder is both impossible to answer and deeply irrelevant.

I'll add, with even higher confidence you'll agree, that mounting a viable campaign for president is probably one of the most effort-intensive things a human being can do. The range of criticisms one can make of these guys is almost infinite, but "dude's a slacker" really isn't one of them.

jerseyhoya wrote:

dajafi wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Really the only reason you would think Romney did more work than Obama is if you were a racist who thinks black people are lazy

My point, one I'm actually guessing you would agree with, is that the question of who's worked more or who worked harder is both impossible to answer and deeply irrelevant.

I'll add, with even higher confidence you'll agree, that mounting a viable campaign for president is probably one of the most effort-intensive things a human being can do. The range of criticisms one can make of these guys is almost infinite, but "dude's a slacker" really isn't one of them.

I agree with both of those things.

But cshort was responding to a series of posts about Romney saying he isn't one of us, doesn't do things real Americans do, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and has sat around patting himself on his back for being successful because of it. I don't think it's ridiculous to respond that Romney, though he certainly had some advantages due to his family, worked his fucking ass off in life and was remarkably successful in a couple different arenas. And to assert in rebuttal to those charges, even if it's ultimately meaningless to the campaign or difficult to measure, that he worked harder along the way than Obama.

“[I]t struck me as plausible,” said NYU tax expert Daniel Shaviro, who’s been a leading analyst of Romney’s public financial information. “The reason people have been saying he must have paid something is that they’ve figured he must have (as in 2010) had some dividend and interest income plus other ordinary (rather than capital gains) stuff such as speaker fees. Zeroing all that out, if he had such income every year, would have required tax shelter losses that would very likely be deemed (by the IRS and many legal experts) as abusive.”

Shaviro also notes that if, using his IRA, Romney had avoided realizing capital gains on Bain shares, it would have helped him accomplish what’s known as “loss harvesting.” That’s when investors sell off financial losers to cancel out capital gains they’ve realized elsewhere in their portfolio. The lower one’s capital gains in any given year, the easier it is to harvest that loss.

We know Romney harvested losses because he carried forward a substantial capital loss in 2010. “[H]aving less capital gains to begin with via the Bain strategy from the TPM blog post would obviously make it easier to get to zero RE the capital gains,” Shaviro adds.

Another expert on tax strategies for high net worth individuals notes that unless Romney’s IRA were a Roth IRA — and it’s not — he will be required to pay taxes on that money as ordinary income whenever he ultimately draws on it.

For Kleinbard, all of this points to the problem with the standard measure of one’s effective federal tax rate — typically taxes paid divided by adjusted gross income. That measure doesn’t account for wealth accumulation or strategies wealthy people use to effectively reduce their own denominator.