On Memorial Day weekend in 2006, then state Senator Richard R. Tisei and his business and life partner, Bernard F. Starr, celebrated more than five years of selling North Shore real estate by moving their firm into a new office building they constructed at a prime location just off Route 128 in Lynnfield.
But by then a once booming market was already slowing, and home sales in Lynnfield plummeted by 50 percent that year, burying Tisei and his firm, Northrup Associates, in losses. In 2006 and again in 2008, Tisei’s real estate setbacks outweighed his state salaries of $65,000 and $85,000, erasing his obligation to pay federal income taxes.
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This is all well and good and I'm willing to stipulate that there are no egregious faults in either man (their relatives notwithstanding). What are we left with then? I ask this basic question. If my mother, after a lifetime of hard work, both as parent and employee, were to fall ill and at the same suffer serious financial setbacks, which candidate and which Party would advocate measures to make sure that she did not suffer? Actually, my mother had that experience. What saved her dignity and her happiness in her final years was Social Security, Medicare and, finally, Medicaid for nursing home care. The Republican Party has fought and vilified those programs, and thus the welfare of my mother, at every opportunity since the 1930s. Democrats will take care of my mom first and billionaires somewhere down the line. The reverse is true for the Republicans. So the answer to my question on the welfare of my mother would be...?
You might want to check the facts nahantjim. In 1984 Biden proposed freezing social security and Obama proposed cuts to social security just last year as part the grand bargain he wanted to strike with congress. He's now taking about striking a bargain with congress post election to get things moving in D.C. again. Wanna bet whether social security will be part of the bargain again? Then there's the Obamacare Medicare cuts of $716B. Romney and Ryan also want to overhaul these programs so I'm not saying their going to leave everything as-is either but both are trying to deal with the same dire fiscal reality of our government. Believing one will leaving these programs exactly as they are is failing to recognize the fiscal mess we're in.
I wouldn't vote for Tierney but the Globe seems to be working extra hard to make Tisei look better than he is here. Based on the numbers shown, Northrup should be making over $1M a year for Tisei and Starr in income. That they choose to own so many assets with so many mortgages doesn't change the fact that they have over $1M in income plus his state salary and didn't pay any taxes. One might even ask whether they bought / continue to hold all those properties expressly because they can write them off to reduce their taxes if one was doing the whole journalist's job. Real Estate can be sold and even though it hasn't been the best market, if Tisei was feeling any real financial pain he could make much of it go away by simply selling some of the homes. At which point he'd still have over $1M in income every year and much more of it would be his to keep and thus be taxable.
My estimate of $1M in income comes from most real estate brokerages at best splitting the commission between the business and the agent that did the sale. If they usually get 4 - 6% and the "house" keeps half, then that comes out to something between $2.4 and $3.6M in commissions. Half of that is $1.2 - $1.8M. Assume that at least some of the sales involve another broker and those come down to a mean somewhere around $1M on $60M in sales. Heck, even if he and Starr only net $600,000 a year that makes them more than $1M every 4 years. Again, that they choose to spend that on real estate and write it off is their choice but it doesn't change the fact that they are earning millionaire grade income and paying a whole lot lower tax rate than most people that earn 10-80% of what they earn.
It is very mis-leading to have the teaser for the article make it sound like they lost so much in their business that they didn't need to pay taxes when the article then goes on to disclose that they main reason that they aren't profitable is their personal mortgage expenses on multiple properties they own.
“We’re struggling, but we’ve made it through the worst recession since the Great Depression,” said Tisei. Practically a word-for-word quote of President Obama. This has been a tough thing for the whole USA to gradually build out of, and no president would've been able to do significantly better, despite the beliefs of impatient Americans, who've never known real hardship.