The deliciousness of Rolling Jubilee What to make of Rolling Jubilee , the latest bright idea from Occupy? The idea is simple: Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. Rolling Jubilee has already raised $115,000 -- which they say is enough money to buy and cancel more than $2.3 million of debt. After Thursday's variety show and telethon , both sums will surely rise substantially. The reaction from the financial press has been mixed. Tim Worstall somehow contrives to admire the idea while bashing everything else associated with Occupy at the same time; Nick Summers , on the other hand, thinks it's fundamentally misguided. A person's debt can't truly disappear with no consequences. The amount forgiven is technically income -- "cancellation of debt income," in Internal Revenue Service terms. It's a dollar-for-dollar conversion, says Robert Willens, a tax expert based in New York. For example, a person with regular income of $50,000 who has $25,000 in credit-card debt discharged will be taxed on April 15 as if she earns $75,000. "There's not any doubt about the tax outcome at all," says Willens. "That's almost always the case with debt discharges -- you wind up with this tax problem that almost always mitigates the benefit of the discharge." Summers didn't