thanks for your prompt reply, very helpful.
I didn't really have any issue with the numbers, or which ones should go where on the forms. It just looked like I was going to get thousands of dollars of income and not have to pay tax on them. Sounds great, but I don't think the IRS would agree;)
But I think you explained my conundrum by pointing out the "ordinary income" part of the equation IS being taxed, just not in the capital gains area. The 24k in ordinary income in our example isn't escaping taxes, I guess it's getting assigned taxes somewhere else in the TT program behind the scenes. Since it's being taxed as "ordinary income," it therefore comes off the figures used to determine capital gains taxes?
I think it just all boils down to my not really understanding MLPs and how their revenue is handled and taxed compared to a normal stock investment. I'm pretty sure if I was audited for last year I completely screwed up the taxes; unfortunately I didn't find this chain of comments until yesterday. But this year now looks solid. Thanks!
One last question...since the MLP sales schedules don't break out numbers between ST and LT, but just give a percentage, should one just take that percentage and fiddle with the ordinary income and cost basis numbers to figure out capital gains in different long term and short term categories?
