I have to go see Leo Godwin of the United States Internal Revenue Service in a bit. After seven years, he noticed that I sold $250,000 worth of stock. But what he did notice is that some of it was bought on margin. Which means, I didn’t have the money. And I sold it within a few minutes at essentially the same price because it was either moving the wrong way or was moving the right way and turned around. Most of the stock, I never owned, I borrowed it from the broker, sold it, and a few minutes later, bought stock to give back to the broker. This is called “selling short”. Some people make money doing this stuff, but I don’t have the constitution for it. It is a roller coaster ride powered by the conflict between fear and greed. I did it because I was pretty sure Harvard would succeed in outsourcing me and I needed to find some way to make money. That was not it.<\/p>\n
Anyway, if you make money doing this stuff, it is taxed as income.1<\/sup> But Leo wants half of the $250,000, most of which I never had. Leo knows that there’s nowhere near that much in the account now. If Leo really wanted to be helpful, he would ask the broker if I every withdrew anything ‘cuz I didn’t. But Leo didn’t do that. Leo came to my apartment. Actually he met me on the porch, where I explained all this to him. He wanted me to fill out some forms and produce some records. I invited him in to show him why that was an unreasonable expectation. He refused. There’s a lot more to this story. Stay tuned. I do feel I owe an apology to that portion of the left that didn’t<\/strong> refuse to help me keep my job at Harvard, but not to the Gummint. Given that SCOTUS broke the court system in 2000 and the Executive … well… I’ll try the Legislative.<\/p>\n 1<\/sup>If you hold the stock for some period of months, it is then called “capital gains” and is taxed at a lower rate. The down side of that approach is that you actually have to have<\/strong> the money to buy the stock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have to go see Leo Godwin of the United States Internal Revenue Service in a bit. After seven years, he noticed that I sold $250,000 worth of stock. But what he did notice is that some of it was bought on margin. Which means, I didn’t have the money. And I sold it within […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":168,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/168"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/fensterm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}