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To: tonyt who wrote (56115)	5/9/1999 10:39:00 AM
From: Wayners	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Loss carryforwards are limited to $3,000 per year. Nobody is ever going to live long enough to collect more than a few hundred thousand dollars in loss carryforwards. Your example is identical to mine. In any year where you have losses, the pressure is really on to reverse those losses anyway possible during that year, find anyway to offset them. I know people that in one year in APM have collected enough tax loss carryforwards to nearly last them the rest of their lives. They'll never live long enough to recoup their losses and if they lose more, it gets worse. The reason why we have the $3,000 loss carryforward is apparantly some Congressman started seeing a lot of financial paper advertisements from companies basically selling losses and guaranteeing losses back in the 1980's from stuff like sheep farming and the like. People were generating paper losses to offset gains, etc. etc. Thing is they overreacted. The wash sale rule eliminates a lot of that, but they felt the wash sale rule didn't eliminate all of the paper loss offsets because you only have to wait 30 days before its no longer a wash sale. They figured there would be a lot of people waiting exactly 30 days and then getting back into investments and thus still booking paper losses. They seemed to think that all of these investments eventually recovered. Problem is many people don't play this game and their investments never recover, and they are booking real losses and paying taxes on no gains whatsoever.