Reading two news articles almost always gets a person closer to the truth than just reading one.

Here's how Brett Philbin and Aaron Lucchetti of the Wall Street Journal handle a news article that appears under the headline "Jefferies CEO Is King of Pay/A $45.2 million package for Handler tops Wall Street chiefs Blankfein, Dimon":

The king of Wall Street pay doesn't reside at any of the household-name financial firms but at a midsize investment bank that likes to keep a low profile.

Jefferies Group handed Chairman and Chief Executive Richard Handler a $45.2 million payday, making him the best-paid financial-company leader for the second time in three years.

Mr. Handler got $1 million in salary, a $5 million cash bonus and $39 million in restricted stock awarded over three years, plus other compensation, the New York company said in a securities filing Tuesday.

From National Public Radio:

Meanwhile, Gallup's fighting on another front, too. For the time being, the company has been suspended from winning any new federal contracts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it has evidence "indicating a lack of business honesty or integrity."

Earlier this month, Timothy Cannon, a former FEMA official who was set to go work for Gallup, pleaded guilty to a criminal conflict-of-interest charge for steering more than $1 million in work to the company before he left government.

Federal prosecutors built the case with several emails from Cannon and Gallup executives. Cannon is due to be sentenced in April. His lawyer, David Schertler, says Cannon "is looking forward to putting this matter behind him."

Kruse, Gallup's lawyer, said in an email that the temporary suspension is "a normal course of business procedure for the government when allegations arise, even those which are not yet proven in a court of law."

From an article in the Wall Street Journal:

News Corp. doesn't disclose the financial performance of News America Marketing, but Nomura Securities estimates the division brought in $1.1 billion in revenue in the year through June 2012, when it generated $210 million in operating income.

The division will be split off along with various publishing businesses later this year into a company that will retain the News Corp. name. That company generated $8.7 billion in revenue in the year through June 2012 with operating income of $429 million, excluding a one-time charge, according to pro forma figures in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Re the earlier post on The NLRB versus the D.C. Circuit:

Dear Ira,

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The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about what looks like the Obama administration's decision basically to disregard a D.C. Circuit opinion that the Senate wasn't actually in "recess" when President Obama used a "recess appointment" to name members to the National Labor Relations Board.

It's a great constitutional battle in that it involves all three co-equal branches of government — the legislative branch, i.e., the Senate, which stayed in session to prevent recess appointments; the executive branch, i.e., President Obama, who went ahead and made the appointments anyway; and the Article III Judiciary, i.e., the D.C. Circuit, which ruled the recess appointments illegal. It also resonates because of various other ways that Mr. Obama has chosen to use his discretion to disregard other laws he would prefer to be changed, such as immigration laws.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is a defense of the charitable tax deduction:

It is tempting to think that the limitations on deductions will hurt the rich by cutting back on their deductions. But the burden will fall heavily on the recipients of charitable support, for as the price of making a charitable gift rises (anywhere from 30 to 100 percent), the level of charitable giving will decline. Hurt in the shuffle are, of course, the low-income beneficiaries of charity….

Why then would the government take steps to cut back on charitable giving? The most obvious explanation is both insidious and dangerous. It is to shrink the size of its main competitors in the private sector in order to increase the dependence of ordinary people on the federal government.

Another advantage of the charitable deduction is that it implements the Hayekian imperative of decentralized control over social resources.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a USA Today op-ed explaining his proposal for a tax on the post-government earnings of government officials:

After all, when it comes to your value as an ex-government official, it really is a case of "you didn't build that." Your value to a future employer comes from having held a taxpayer-funded position and from having wielded taxpayer-conferred power. Why shouldn't the taxpayers get a cut?

More significantly, it is a principle of economics that when you tax something, you get less of it. So if we're worried about revolving-door government, we should tax it, so as to get less of it. And since the revolving door generates bad effects for society, taxation would be an appropriate way of discouraging it.

Conscious Capitalism, a new book by Whole Foods Market co-CEO and cofounder John Mackey and Bentley University Professor of Marketing Raj Sisodia, is the subject of my column this week. Please check the column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

From a Wall Street Journal editorial about Jack Lew, President Obama's nominee for Treasury Secretary:

Mr. Geithner succeeded in bailing out Citigroup and prevailed over Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chairman Sheila Bair. Like these columns, Ms. Bair wanted to clean out Citi's management and asked her fellow regulators to consider putting it into receivership. In her recent memoir, Ms. Bair writes that when she suggested in early 2009 that Citi's private investors should take losses before the company received additional government assistance, "that was a nonstarter for Tim."

I have to say I found this passage pretty confusing. Citi's private investors, in early 2009 and after, did take losses. The price of their shares went way down. Their ownership stake was diluted. If Ms. Bair had gone ahead and put Citi "into receivership" it might have further weakened the confidence of investors in other financial institutions by making them worry that their own institutions would be the next targets.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's speech Thursday night to the Republican National Committee has been attracting positive attention through the weekend. Here are some excerpts, which are newsworthy in part because of the not-so-subtle jabs at Paul Ryan, who is a possible rival of Mr. Jindal's for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016:

Today's conservatism is completely wrapped up in solving the hideous mess that is the federal budget, the burgeoning deficits, the mammoth federal debt, the shortfall in our entitlement programs…even as we invent new entitlement programs.

We seem to have an obsession with government bookkeeping.

This is a rigged game, and it is the wrong game for us to play.

Today it's the fiscal cliff, tomorrow it's the fiscal apocalypse, and then it will be the fiscal Armageddon.

But I have news for you; our government already went off the fiscal cliff.

It happened years ago, and has happened every year for many years.

The way that William Ackman's short of Herbalife turns on regulatory action Mr. Ackman is calling for against the company was the subject of earlier posts on this site here and here. It looks like investor Carl Icahn has a similar view, and he does not approve. Mr. Icahn gave an interview yesterday to Bloomberg Television. Here are excerpts as provided by Bloomberg Television:

On whether Icahn has a long position in Herbalife:

"I stay away from commenting on positions that we have or we don't have if they don't have a 13D on file. I will duck that question and not say yes and not say no."

On Herbalife, and whether Bill Ackman or Dan Loeb is right or wrong in their positions on the stock:

Businesses that started in garages — including Google, Apple, Amazon, Mattel, Hewlett-Packard, and Lender's Bagels — were the topic of a column I wrote a few months ago. The latest example comes courtesy of the Economist magazine, which profiles Abe Karem, the aerospace engineer behind the Predator drone: "Mr. Karem founded a company, Leading Systems, in the garage of his Los Angeles home and began work on a drone that would ultimately transform the way America wages war."

I love the garage-based business story, in part because it encapsulates the upward mobility and sense of possibility at the heart of the American dream. It also pushes back against all the concern about income inequality, because it's a reminder that many of the most successful American entrepreneurs didn't start rich, but that the opportunity is there for those with a brain and a garage and a good idea and some luck and the willingness to work hard.

Keith Hennessey assesses the prospects for tax reform, which he thinks is more likely to pass if it happens on a revenue-neutral basis, or on a basis in which the additional revenue projected is only modest and related to the growth effects of the rate cuts and simplification. He's not particularly optimistic: "Senator Schumer's comments suggest that Senate Democrats' priority for tax reform is not making the code more efficient or increasing economic growth, it is raising total tax revenues to finance bigger government." He goes on:

If in their budget resolution Senate Democrats require that tax reform raise total taxes by hundreds of billions of dollars or more, then tax reform will at best be an interesting contrast in partisan approaches between Senate Democrats and House Republicans, and at worst a partisan flame-out in which the Senate fails to pass a bill or doesn't even try.

A press release from the Securities and Exchange Commission announces a settlement by which the Egan-Jones Ratings Company and its president Sean Egan "agreed to be barred for at least 18 months from rating asset-backed and government securities issuers as an NRSRO." An NRSO, if you were wondering, is a "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization."