CU professor calls “BS” on Romney’s 13 percent tax rate claim

[unblock]

43. harvesting naturally occuring losses is different from designing artificial losses to harvest.

most of us try to honestly make money with each investment (yes, some people hedge, but with intent to make money on the combination, e.g., i think this set of stocks will do better than the s&p 500).

come december, sure, you look at which losers it might be helpful to dump for tax purposes and you avoid dumping your profitable invesmtents until january to defer those taxes. that's fine.


what i'm talking about is designing a set of offseting investments that from the start is not intended to make money overall, but is intended purely to allow harvesting at different times. it is NOT the case that millions and millions of people to this, and certainly not per the advice of their accountants, because the irs does not permit this.


i recognize that this level of detail reduces the effectiveness of the political argument, but assuming he actually did this, this level of detail is not necessary for the political argument. we could then just say "tax cheat" and leave it at that.