the law is the law. as the saying goes, it may be harsh but its the law. If you dont like it, petition to have the law changed by your congressman. And in fact, thats what happened

the aricle says “that Congress later enacted a law forbidding the tactic,”

In two ways.  First, the property usually remains in their possession until death.  Second, the write-off amount is for the “value” of the piece, *not* what they actually paid for it, so it can actually shelter more than the (no longer) taxable cash value.

“Where do you live that people buy imaginary cars? Here in the US of A, we mosey on down to the dealership and drive one off the lot.”

And those would often be (some of) the cars in question, a year or so later!  It is quite common for the auto manufacturers to “sell” cars to dealers in one quarter to boost their numbers, then have them “returned” the next quarter.  Yes, it’s stupid, and it doesn’t really do much for the long run, but it has a few advantages:
- any retiring VIP can take a larger than normal bonus and leave the downside to his successor
- a badly-selling model can be kept out of the trade magazines by masking the true sale numbers
- annual numbers can be made to look better with 364 days to make it true
- dealerships can get better bank rates with more inventory (supposedly) on the lot as collateral
etc etc

Same reason you would take deductions on your taxes for contributions to non-profit charities.  It (was) a valid option for tax avoidance/deferral.  Everybody does things like this, just thee and me usually do it for less-than-newsworthy dollar amounts.  :)

What a f**ked up country this is…

And far too much, most likely every single page, of the Internal Revenue Code is written like this!

No, but the matter they have historically done so, is indeed unethical, amoral, and absolutely destructive of the tax base.

Example:  they purchase a work of art for $10,000 then donate it to a museum while claiming its value at $60,000, thus writing said donation on their taxes, and realizes a $50,000 profit at the expense of the tax base (i.e., taxpayers, etc.).

And there are far more extensive tax evasion and tax avoidance schemes than that.

Every American should have read Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich.

As usual, it’s up to the reader to decide if they are purposefully being mislead or if this is a simple omission for clarity sake.

Yeah, they’re real rebels, those radical, Libertarian-minded college kids.

(¬_¬)

It is possible for students to reach opinions other than the ones we might hold dear, even on college campuses where such thinking runs counter to the norm.

I’ve been wondering just who funds it. Not that its paid promoters would know.

I was on a campus the other day where some sidewalk theater was going on. Anti-security-state theater, wherein youngish people acted out an extreme airport scenario (a guy got his book taken away). “Do you want the government interfering in your life like this?!” A few students who’d stopped to look shook their heads no, then took the offered pamphlets. Turns out the agitprop was put on by a Libertarian group. A completely student-run Libertarian group? I doubt it.

The tentacles of the Koch Bros. and their ilk are long, subtle, and slimy promoters of the supposed Virtues of Selfishness. They sure do get around a lot these days.

Hypocrisy – how does it work? 
So the big revelation churned up by all this investigative journalism is that people like to keep their own money and will use most legal means necessary to keep it from being hoovered up by the taxman?

To the barricades!

Like all those car companies selling cars they haven’t built. Imagine selling something that doesn’t exist.

Where do you live that people buy imaginary cars? Here in the US of A, we mosey on down to the dealership and drive one off the lot.

Read up on the ways that trust management fees are used by wealthy individuals to manipulate their taxable income. A lot of this so-called “charity” has exactly one beneficiary: the rich person who contributed the money in the first place.

“You first must close out your short position by the 30th day after the end of the tax year in which the transaction occurred, says Tesser. For most investors, this would be Jan. 30 of the following year. But for those of you whose tax year ends on, say, June 30, you’d have to close the position by July 30. Then, beginning on the day the short position is closed, you must hold the original long position for at least another 60 days. This must be a “hold naked” position for the entire 60 days. That means you can’t use options to reduce your risk on these shares in any other way. So if you sell short against
the box in January, you can hedge yourself for nearly 13 months, maximum, as long as you’re willing to be unhedged for another 60 days after that.”

Speaking as a former margin clerk, you still see the occasional short against the box transaction from someone who wants to take advantage of the now sharply decreased tax loophole it creates. From what I could tell, most of the people who short against the box nowadays are not quite as clever as they think they are, and the short against the box is often part of a larger scheme of manipulations that may or may not work as intended. But, as we all know, the Cheney administration severely cut funding for IRS enforcement, and FINRA is considerably more toothless than its constituent agencies used to be. So you might just get away with it (whatever “it” is), if you’ve got a decent tax lawyer & accountant.

Let’s say Mr. L owns 50,000,000 shares of company E.  If he sells 12M shares, he’ll owe capital gains taxes on the sale.  If instead, he borrows 12M shares from a relative, and sells those (thus shorting the stock), he doesn’t owe capital gains taxes (they weren’t his shares he sold, they were the borrowed shares), and if the price goes down, he can cover the short from the market.  If on the other hand, the price goes up, he can cover the short from his own stocks.  The problem is even though this later case is generally identical to if he had sold his own shares (he is down 12M shares, for which he was paid), it was not being taxed in the same manner as a sale.