Having just joined the possibly scores of readers who have visited this outpost on the fringe of the internet, you might be curious as to how I came up with the name "Active Passivities and Other Moronic Oxen". Well in order to explain that I have to explain how I came up with the name for my first blog, which is Passive Activities and Other Oxymoron.
PAOO was an outlet for me to express my own quirky views on taxation. For many years I have made it a habit to at least look at almost all items of original source federal tax material. Originally I did it just to find items of interest to my client base. Real estate is probably my biggest interest. One set of rules that had a lot of interest for me were those created by Section 469 - Passive activity losses and credits limited. That particular set of rules was part of the perennial arms race that the war against tax shelters has created. It was actually supposed to be the stake driven through the heart of the shelters, but they continue to exist in different forms, although lower marginal rates make them less exciting.
The odd thing about passive activities is they are not passive income as defined in other areas of the Code. It occurred to me that "passive activity" is clearly an oxymoron like "jumbo shrimp" or "reasonable attorney's fees" and that the Code with its special rules and exceptions to exceptions naturally will give birth to oxymorons like "refundable credits".
After a while I realized that from time to time I liked to write about things that had no plausible connection to taxation, so I decided that I would have a "bizzarro blog". If you read DC comics you remember that Bizarro was kind of an opposite copy of Superman. So I more or less came up with the bizarro name of my original tax blog.
I stopped PAOO when I managed to get on forbes.com. Most of the ideas for a name on that platform were shot down so I just ended up with "Passive Activities", which is probably not that good a name. Forbes only has an exclusive on my material for a couple of weeks so I have begun the arduous process of transferring all my tax material to "Your Tax Matters Partner" . That is also a Code reference (specifically 6231(a)(7)).
At any rate, those changes make the name of this blog entirely pointless even to me. I have been struggling to come up with something else. My main interest besides tax is American history from 1830 to 1870 with an emphasis on reform movements, but I find myself entranced by many other things from time to time and even come up with things that seems original to me - although they usually turn out not to be. For example, I independently came up with the connection between prime and perfect numbers (see Mersenne primes). With my desk top computer and the excel spreadsheet I created, I would have been the greatest mathematician of the 17th Century (or maybe they would have burned me at the stake).
At any rate, if you would like, take a look at some of the material on this blog and see if you have a good idea for its name. "Stupid White Boy From New Jersey" is the current prime contender, so you probably can do better than that.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.
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