On needing help and not really knowing how to get it.
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.
Anyway, if you make money doing this stuff, it is taxed as income.1 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 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.
1If 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 the money to buy the stock.
