Thursday, August 18, 2005

For those contemplating a career in law:

I give you a glimpse of my reading for the day*:
Sec. 61. Gross Income Defined.
a. general definition. - Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle, gross income means all income from whatever source derived, including (but not limited to) the following items:
1. Compensation for services, including fees, commissions, fringe benefits, and similar items;
2. Gross income derived from business;
3. Gains derived from dealings in property;
4. Interest;
5. Rents;
6. Royalties;
7. Dividends;
8. Alimony and separate maintenance payments;
9. Annuities;
10. Income from life insurance and endowment contracts;
11. Pensions;
12. Income from discharge of indebtedness;
13. Distributive share of partnership gross income;
14. Income in respect of a decedent; and
15. Income from an interest in an estate or trust.

That's right. Income means income. Woohoo! I'm so glad I came to law school to learn that!

* The following supplied by Selected Federal Taxation, Statutes and Regulations, Selected and Edited by Daniel J. Lathrope, 2006 Edition.

5 comments:

Michelle said...

Ahhhhhh yes, then you can kiss "income" bye bye at Tax time!
Waaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh :(

Steve said...

Prof. Mussleman. I swear he looks like an older, thinner Tom Arnold on Rogaine, but nobody believes me.

Bookworm said...

My tax teacher was a drug addict (no kidding), and this infirmity managed to make the impenetrable tax code even more unintelligible than it would appear at first glance.

The one thing about law is that nothing is stated in an ordinary way. Law is a foreign language just as is any other. Since I'm bad at languages, it wasn't until I was about 4 years out of law school that I stopped mentally translating every bit of legal gobbledygook into English and started "speaking law." It was another 10 years before I stopped speaking law, spoke English again, and did much better before judges!

Cassie said...

That is an absolutely perfect way of putting it. Attorneys are really interpreters. It's interesting that we need interpreters to tell us what the law says but we're still expected to follow it.

Michelle said...

No wonder i do so bad, i can't even speak English!