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Thursday, September 13, 2007
Carried Interest -- Humor from the Street
Below are bits from recent pieces from the belly of the beast -- the depths of the corporate canyon at the lower end of Manhattan, where lies (damn lies) Wall Street -- with telling arguments regarding carried interest. Both are scary, both are funny (tho only one intentionally so).
Of course, there are plenty of strong free-market arguments in favor of ending a tax subsidy that every economist from Greg Mankiw to William A. Niskanen (of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors) will tell you is distortive and inefficient, an anomaly in the code that tax cut champ Chuck Grassley (R-IA) warns is impugning the code's integrity, a tax incentive to encourage behavior by multi-millionaires that would occur even without public assistance.
You will not find such pedestrian arguments in these pieces. No, the arguments featured here are very hard to understand yet somehow side-splitting. You see, they attempt the impossible: to defend the indefensible on the ground that it is incomprehensible.
Let's go to the video tape:
- Paid to Listen, Wall Street Journal:
Congress once thought it had a political and policy winner in raising taxes on the private equity industry. Now it's not so sure. Complains Republican Sen. Charles Grassley: "There are powerful forces in this town that have been organized specifically on this issue that are probably going to be able to slow it up into next year."
His Democratic partner in this waltz, Max Baucus, chairman of the finance committee, adds: "It's a very complicated subject."
Hooray for special interests!
- A Wall Street Trader Learns Some Taxing Lessons, Bloomberg News:
The working rich are already way too heavily taxed.
The truest arguments are often the ones that are hardest to make ordinary people understand, and this is the truest of them all. Rich people know how to invest extra money. Poor people just squander it on necessities. That's why capitalism works so well: it keeps money out of the hands of people who don't know how to use it and directs it to people who know how to make it grow.
This is why it makes no sense for rich people to give away their money. Warren Buffett had the right idea: keep piling up as much as possible until the very end -- and then give it to a guy even richer than you.
Now that we've cleared that up...
Posted by Dana Chasin
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