As CEO of GE, Jeff Immelt used to fly to some destinations with a second, empty corporate jet in case his primary one had mechanical problems, the Wall Street Journal reports. "The two jets sometimes parked far apart so they wouldn't attract attention, and flight crews were told not to openly discuss the empty plane," the newspaper says.

The Journal doesn't get into it, but that news certainly provides some ironical and entertaining context for Mr. Immelt's tweet criticizing President Trump for his announced decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, and for Mr. Immelt's "leadership" at an event at which President Obama was honored by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation with its "Profile in Courage Award" in part for his actions to combat climate change.

George Soros's transfer of $18 billion into his Open Society Foundations nonprofit was made in advance of a tax deadline and may allow him to avoid taxes he'd otherwise owe on the money that had accumulated offshore, Bloomberg News reports:

A New York-based money manager such as Soros could be subject to a top federal income tax rate of 39.6 percent, plus state and city levies.

When Congress eliminated the tax break in 2008, it gave hedge fund managers until Dec. 31, 2017 to bring the cash home and pay the accumulated taxes.

Other reporting on the donation, such as this New York Times article by David Gelles, fails to mention the tax angle.

A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has finally issued its long-awaited opinion in the case of Ganek v. Leibowitz, in which David Ganek sued federal prosecutors and FBI agents for violating his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights by raiding the office of his hedge fund on the basis of a false affidavit.

How Trump is doing as president, as the one-year anniversary of his election approaches, is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) or Newsmax (here).

The real estate website Redfin has a report based on an analysis of its search data indicating that people who live in Democrat-dominated counties are looking to escape to Republican-dominated counties, where housing is more affordable. From the Redfin blog:

In the first half of 2017, more people moved from blue (Democratic) counties to red (Republican) counties than from red to blue counties, according to data on Redfin.com user searches. Counties were classified as "blue" if the Democratic candidate for 2016 won by more than 20 percentage points and vice versa for "red" counties.

Overall, 7.4 percent more people moved out of blue counties than to them. Compare that with red counties, which saw about 1 percent more people moving in than moving out. Purple counties, where there's a more balanced share of Democrats and Republicans, saw 3.9 percent more migrants moving in than out.

Forgive me for delighting again (here is an earlier post on the topic) in the degree to which President Kennedy's tax cut is being used as a model for President Trump's. Here is Lawrence Lindsey, writing in today's Wall Street Journal under the headline "Tax Reform Will Give Workers a Raise":

There actually is a historical analogue to the legislation currently under consideration. In 1964 Congress enacted a tax cut that similarly encouraged capital formation and entrepreneurship. It cut the top personal rate by 21 points. It cut the corporate rate and introduced accelerated depreciation. The result was a boom that went on for the rest of the decade.

When a supply-side tax bill like this is passed at a time of full employment, labor's share of the economic pie expands rapidly. That happened after the passage of the 1964 bill, and it will happen again if the current tax reform becomes law.

President Trump is correct to detect bias in the press and to speak publicly about it, I write in my column this week. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

The New York Times travel section has an article about hotels that are making like airlines and adding on extra fees for things — like suburban parking, early arrival, the in-room safe, or minibar restocking — that used to be included in the basic room fee. Glancingly but intriguingly, the Times suggests that these fees may be tax-driven:

why not just include the fees in the room rate?

There are a number of reasons, though the only one that possibly benefits the consumer is that if fees were included in the nightly rate, they would be subjected to municipal occupancy taxes.

There's an unintended consequence for you: cities jack up hotel taxes, and the hotels respond by changing their pricing policies so that all of a sudden a chunk of the money they are charging customers isn't subject to the tax.

Online retailer Amazon is looking at getting into the pharmacy business, CNBC reports.

If the problem is soaring health care costs, in part related to prices for medicine, an Amazon-related solution — one that relies on bargaining clout, operational efficiency, market competition, and the profit motive — just might be able to make progress where government-driven solutions — ObamaCare, Medicare, Medicaid — have not fully succeeded. One might argue that the current drug system works reasonably well at creating incentives for innovation and at providing many people access to life-saving medicines at relatively low out of pocket costs. It will be interesting to watch, if Amazon does get into the business, whether it thinks it can actually add value, or whether it just wants to capture some of the market share and pharmacy dollars now flowing to other retailers.

My column this week begins:

The most illuminating recent article about the tax reform debate didn't appear on the front page of any newspaper. It wasn't in the business section, or on the editorial page. It was an interview with Ellen Stern that appeared on an inside page of the New York Times arts section.

Mrs. Stern isn't an academic economist or a politician or a tax policy expert at some Washington think tank. She's a widow. Her husband, Jerome, died in March.

Please read the rest of the article at the New York Sun (here) or Newsmax (here).

Garage-based businesses have been a longtime obsession of this site — a short list includes Hiller Helicopter, Google, Apple, Amazon, Mattel, Hewlett-Packard, Lender's Bagels, and the company behind the Predator drone, as earlier coverage here and here and here explains.

The latest example comes courtesy of today's New York Times: Alpha Architect, a "$700 million asset management firm" run by an ex-marine, Wesley R. Gray, with seed funding from Edward J. Stern. The Times reports that "Mr. Gray still works out of his garage" in suburban Philadelphia.

Amid the attention to disaster relief in Puerto Rico, it's worth remembering this passage from Ronald Reagan's November 13, 1979 remarks announcing his candidacy for president of the United States:

It is now time to take stock of our own house and to resupply its strength.

Part of that process involves taking stock of our relationship with Puerto Rico. I favor statehood for Puerto Rico and if the people of Puerto Rico vote for statehood in their coming referendum I would, as President, initiate the enabling legislation to make this a reality.

There have been a series of such referenda with varying and close results. In the most recent such vote, in 2017, 97% of those who voted chose statehood. In a similar referendum in 1998, 46.6% chose statehood while 50.5% chose "none of the above."

From President Trump's speech yesterday about tax reform:

Democrat President John F. Kennedy championed tax cuts that surged the economy and massively reduced unemployment. As President Kennedy very wisely said, "The single most important fiscal weapon available to strengthen the national economy is the federal tax policy. The right kind of tax cut at the right time" -- at the right time, this is the right time -- "is the most effective measure that this government could take to spur our economy forward." That was President Kennedy. (Applause.)

My fellow Americans, this is the right tax cut, and this is the right time.

This quote from Kennedy appears on page 130 of the book JFK, Conservative, which has a whole chapter about Kennedy as a tax cutter.

Jennet Conant's new biography of her grandfather, James Bryant Conant, who was president of Harvard and who helped to develop the atom bomb during World War II, is called "Man of the Hour." It is also the topic of my column this week, which you can read in full over at Newsmax by clicking here.

Atul Gawande does some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting for the New Yorker in his hometown of Athens, Ohio, and unearths some valuable insights:

A right makes no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, and that felt perverse to Maria and Joe. They both told me about people they know who don't work and yet get Medicaid coverage with no premiums, no deductibles, no co-pays, no costs at all—coverage that the Duttons couldn't dream of.

"I see people on the same road I live on who have never worked a lick in their life," Joe said, his voice rising. "They're living on disability incomes, and they're healthier than I am." Maria described a relative who got disability payments and a Medicaid card for a supposedly bad back, while taking off-the-books roofing jobs....