Forbes spells out the tax benefits to Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway of his deal to trade Berkshire's appreciated Procter & Gamble stock for Procter's Duracell battery brand:

Berkshire, according to public documents, is sitting on billions of dollars in capital gains on its Procter & Gamble holding, which stretches many years. By paying for Duracell with Berkshire's 1.9% holding of Procter & Gamble's stock, Buffett is likely to minimize his capital gains bill significantly.

According to Berkshire's most recent annual letter, Berkshire acquired its current 1.9% stake in P&G at a price of $336 million. As of November, Berkshire's 52.5 million share stake is worth around $4.7 billion, meaning Buffett's investing portfolio is sitting on billions in capital gains, which are taxed at a 38% rate when accounting for federal and state taxes.

However, by transferring $4.7 billion in stock back to P&G, Berkshire will likely avoid those capital gains taxes.

Keith Hennessey has a post — headlined Honesty About Lying" — deconstructing the comments of Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design ObamaCare and was recently caught talking about "the stupidity of the American voter." Mr. Hennessey writes that the tactic described by Gruber of deliberately obscuring the costs of ObamaCare as a way of getting it passed "is repulsive and unethical in a representative democracy."

Call me a contrarian, or accuse me of low expectations, but my idea of a successful Republican Congress isn't one that passes ten new laws. It isn't one that passes six new laws, or five. In fact, we'd probably be lucky to get away with a Republican Congress that abstained from law-passing altogether.

— From my column this week. Please check the complete column out at the New York Sun (here) and at Reason (here).

Justice Scalia's statement, joined by Justice Thomas, announcing that he "will be receptive to granting" a petition from someone challenging the idea that a court should defer to the Securities and Exchange Commission's definition of insider trading law has triggered a laudatory editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

The Journal editorial expresses the wish that Justice Scalia will live (and, presumably, continue serving on the high court) "forever." The Journal concludes:

The insider-trading laws need clarifying by the courts, much as the Justices limited the much-abused "honest services" statute in 2010 in Skilling v. U.S. Let's hope Justice Scalia gets his chance.

Kudos to the Journal for noticing Justice Scalia's statement, and for agreeing that the insider-trading laws "need clarifying."

The "Conversations With Bill Kristol" interview this week is with Joseph Lieberman, who tells this anecdote about the difference between President Obama and President Clinton:

the last year when I was in the Senate, I was sitting at a table in the Senate. We happened to be at the Senate Democratic Caucus and one of the colleagues said, "When's the last time any of you talked to President Obama?" So I said, he turned to me and I said, "Well, about six weeks ago, I got a call about something that was in my committee." "Wow, six weeks ago." So this guy who was the chairman of one of the major committees – "I haven't seen him or talked to him in six months." And then we started talking about Clinton and I remember saying, "Clinton, he'd call you and the problem was how do I get him off the phone," he was just, you know, until he got your agreement to do what he wanted you to do.

Seth Lipsky's August 20 New York Post column headlined "Optimism: The GOP's Missing Ingredient" is resonating again, months after it originally appeared.

George Will has a post-election column advising Republicans in Congress act to abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board (part of ObamaCare), repeal the ObamaCare tax on medical devices, authorize the Keystone XL oil pipeline, pass the REINS Act, and mandate completion of a nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Senator Mike Lee writes in the Federalist:

The three most obvious Republican consensus principles—to me, anyway—are that our budget should:

1. Balance within ten years (without accounting gimmicks),

2. Not raise taxes, and

3. Repeal Obamacare.

These goals comprise the closest thing our party has to a mandate in the wake of this election, and my guess is that every House and Senate Republican is already on record supporting them. If we want to avoid an ugly establishment-grassroots battle next spring, Republican leaders and Budget Committee leaders would do well to reach out to all wings of the party to get buy-in on a framework like this, and only then begin the sausage-making.

Pretty strong passage in this USA Today editorial commenting on the election results:

Among the many lessons Democrats should take from their drubbing on Tuesday is that they need a different relationship with public-sector labor unions.

Labor has long been a key Democratic constituency. But the GOP's sweep of governor races shows how unions — specifically those representing government employees — are also a serious albatross around the party's neck.

Edible Brooklyn has coverage of a Food and Drug Administration crackdown on high-end cheese. The regulatory surge has affected both domestically produced (Wisconsin-based Uplands Cheese's Rush Creek Reserve) and imported cheese, frustrating cheesemongers, makers, and consumers:

The FDA has greatly increased the number of "Holds" and "FDA Import Alerts" placed on cheeses coming into the country, with even time-tested classics like Roquefort getting stopped at the border. Of particular focus for the FDA is "non-toxigenic E Coli" — harmless strains of the coliform which may be present in the cheese but pose no danger to consumers. Rather, their presence is used as a marker to indicate poor hygiene and sanitation practices during production and therefore the risk of other health threats.

President Obama's post-election press conference confirmed the premise of my Monday column. The column began: " The new Congress hasn't even been elected yet, but it's already under pressure to add billions of dollars in new government spending to pay for 'infrastructure.'"

From the transcript of the Obama Wednesday afternoon press conference:

I look forward to Republicans putting forward their governing agenda. I will offer my ideas on areas where I think we can move together to respond to people's economic needs.

So, just take one example. We all agree on the need to create more jobs that pay well. Traditionally, both parties have been for creating jobs rebuilding our infrastructure -- our roads, bridges, ports, waterways. I think we can hone in on a way to pay for it through tax reform that closes loopholes and makes it more attractive for companies to create jobs here in the United States. ..

A pre-election column I wrote focused on some of the tax-related ballot questions.

The outcomes were mixed.Illinois voters approved by a 64% to 36% margin a nonbinding ballot initiative testing support for increasing the income tax on millionaires by 3 percentage points to pay for education.

A soda tax failed in San Francisco but passed in Berkeley.

Steve Forbes has an article with "pieces of legislation Republicans should pass immediately in January."

David Malpass of Encima Global has a characteristically shrewd letter out flagging at least two over-the-horizon issues: the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank expires June 30, 2015, and:

The Fed is likely to maintain its assets at $4.5 trillion into 2016, funding them primarily with the 0.25% IOER (interest on excess reserves) paid to banks for their deposits, over half of which now goes to the U.S. branches of foreign banks. Working against rate hikes, a key question is whether the Fed will be able to increase the IOER to achieve a higher Fed funds rate given the political opposition to banks and the negative impact of an IOER increase on the fiscal deficit.

Some thoughts on the significance of yesterday's election:

1. After Mitt Romney's 2012 defeat, there was lots of talk about "a Republican demographic problem that, if not addressed, could transform the GOP into a permanent minority party." Last night's results don't entirely sink that theory, but they certainly cast doubt on it, particularly the "permanent minority" part.

2. Public employee unions are not the 10,000-pound gorillas of Republican imagination. Scott Walker in Wisconsin took them on and just won his third election in four years. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, took them on over public pension reform in Rhode Island and won the governor's race there. (Update: More on what an awful night it was for the teachers unions in particular is in this post by Rishawn Biddle.)

Whether Scott Brown will win the Senate race in New Hampshire today is anyone's guess, and I wasn't even a particularly huge fan of his back when he was representing Massachusetts, but this YouTube video of his closing campaign ad is really worth a look for a sense of the way Republican candidates are running against President Obama on health care, on the IRS and Veterans department scandals, and on the economy, while still sounding at least somewhat optimistic: