Years of tax returns that have a low percentage are an opportunity for attack ads even if they're strictly legal. It's politic but unwise to pay more than you would strictly have to.

Returning to your "quick decisions in no-win scenarios", there are going to be attack ads based on whether Romney does and what they contain or whether he doesn't and what they might contain, and it's easy to come up with possible contents likely or unlikely. Maybe it's just me that thinks he'd be better served by the path of openness in this instance.

Of course, it's just his taxes, and I feel like the only reasoning people are upset with Romney over this is that they are thinking "What's he hiding? If you have nothing to hide..." which most of us probably dismiss as bad thinking in the usual context. If the People want to make it a law for candidates to disclose their tax information, let it be done, right now he's just breaking a 40 year old precedent. (It seems McCain did the same thing and only released two years--was there an outcry about that? I don't remember, there were so many other juicier attacks. If "you're rich!" is the only thing they can attack you on you're doing alright.)

In other words, the expected value of opacity is greater than the expected value of transparency. Got it.

I say unquestioningly tax-paying. If he did not pay his fair share of taxes wouldn't he have been under IRS investigation years ago?