Tax Lawyer Robert Wood—Gordon Gekko tax Moves
Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:23PM (Forbes) “Greed is good,” Gekko famously intoned. More than 20 years later, in
Gekko’s old age (and Michael Douglas’ too, not that 66 is actually old these days), our need for thrift is in higher gear than our lust for avarice. But thrift, after all, is its own brand of avarice.
Besides, wanting to come out a winner—by a nose, a few percentage points or a few bucks—is human nature. And in any decade, our rakishat-any-age man Gekko would have liked the strong thread in the tax law—really more of a hawser-sized rope—about keeping your taxes as low as possible. In fact, whenever someone is accused of trying to manipulate tax rules to their advantage, they invariably trot out famous tax cases eloquently enunciating the proposition that it’s OK to pay less. Hey, everybody does it. Most famous of all was the rule laid down by Judge Learned Hand a decade before Michael Douglas was born:
