He is just one of thousands of lawyers and tax engineers who, with the alternative tax repealed, would put their minds to work helping the rich pay less.
Again the rulings had been during his time as Luxembourg PM, this time by tax engineers at Ernst & Young, Deloitte, and KPMG.
Despite these efforts, tax engineers have caused problems for exchequers around the world for decades as they have built clever corporate structures to mimimise tax bills for their multinational corporate clients.
Leaked documents detailed the scale of tax schemes engineered by the Luxembourg authorities for many of the biggest global brands and banks.
That was the thinking behind great bipartisan measures such as the creation of Social Security in 1935 and of Medicare in 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and in 1986—the tax reform engineered by Ronald Reagan and his ideological opposite, Speaker Tip O'Neill.
It diverts attention from what's happened at the top -- so no one sees how well CEOs and Wall Street bankers are doing again, no one views the paybacks and tax giveaways engineered by their Republican patrons, and no one focuses on the tide of money flowing from the likes of billionaires Charles and David Koch into Republican coffers.
The memoirs of idealist doctors, engineers, tax collectors, diplomats and politicians, the life stories of film stars, the books about sheikhs and sects, the exposés of the Masons in which names were named: I bought them all because there was a bit of comedy inside them, a bit of life, and a bit of reality - if nothing else, a bit of Turkey.
The budget was balanced late in the decade because of the tax cut he engineered in 1997, he said.
The main proposal could have a significant effect on the finances of cities and states nationwide, including New York, which have engineered tax deals involving billions of dollars' worth of public property.
For decades, Congress has used the tax code to engineer social goals and hand out favors, a trend that accelerated during the Clinton administration and became supercharged during the administration of George W. Bush, which has introduced vast changes in such rapid-fire order that not all the consequences are understood even by people who study tax policy.
It is not uncommon for tax professionals to engineer annual tax savings for individual oligarchs at the top that are equal to Romney's entire fortune.
