Peter J. Reilly has a blog post at Forbes about the taxation of carried interest, or, as he puts it, "the nefarious concept that the evil hedge managers use to turn their service income into capital gains." I can't quite tell for sure if he's sarcastically mocking the over-the-top hostility of those who want to raise taxes on hedge fund managers or if he himself is engaging in such hostility. And I can't quite tell if my failure to be able to tell is a result of my lack of discernment as a reader or the result of a lack of clarity by Mr. Reilly or his editors. FutureOfCapitalism reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creators may want to check the piece out themselves and see what they think, and use the comments thread here to express opinions.

Update: Mr. Reilly says it was an attempt at irony.

Harvey Golub, a former director of Dow Jones and former CEO of American Express, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal replying to Warren Buffett: "Here's my message: Before you 'ask' for more tax money from me and others, raise the $2.2 trillion you already collect each year more fairly and spend it more wisely. Then you'll need less of my money."

The non-profit news organization ProPublica has an article under the headline "Economic Myths: We Separate Fact From Fiction" that could use a little help itself in the separation of fact from fiction department. From the article:

1. Taxes have been going up and are high compared to levels in other countries.

The first part is wrong; the second is also wrong but contains a grain of truth....The only tax increases passed during the Obama administration were part of the health-care reform bill, through which Congress, among other things, raised the Medicare payroll tax for high earners, said Curtis Dubay, a senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

The Obama administration has chosen a Friday afternoon in the summer to put out the news that it is refusing New York City's request to prevent food stamp recipients in the city from using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to pay for soda or other sugary drinks. So if you are poor enough for food stamps – which are subject to only an income test, not an asset test — you have a federal entitlement to spend the vouchers on full-calorie Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

Earlier here, we reported that for the month of May 2011, a record 45,753,078 persons, or about 1 in every 6.8 Americans, participated in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, at a cost of $6.1 billion for the month.

Also earlier, we offered an initial reaction to the idea:

Charles Koch, who is among the "super rich" that Warren Buffett wants to tax more, issued the following statement, according to National Review:

Much of what the government spends money on does more harm than good; this is particularly true over the past several years with the massive uncontrolled increase in government spending. I believe my business and non-profit investments are much more beneficial to societal well-being than sending more money to Washington. — Charles G. Koch, Chairman and CEO, Koch Industries, Inc.

That front-page New York Times article about 'Israel's Wealth Gap" was the topic of an earlier post here noting that "Infuriatingly, the Times article provides no link to the Bank of Israel study" it cited about the concentration of wealth in Israel. One of our Israel-based reader-community member-participant-content co-creator-watchdogs has now helpfully provided a link to the report, which is in Hebrew and was published in April 2008, or more than three years ago, which raises the question of why it's a matter of such urgency for either Israeli protesters or New York Times editors right now. There's also an English-language chart in this Bank of Israel report, on the page numbered 172, or 16 of the PDF.

It's also worth dissecting the following paragraph from the Times article:

Conrad Black has a dispatch on the risks of what he calls "Buffettism": A wealth tax or some other tax-the-rich scheme, Black warns, "would open the gates to terrible abuse, as legislators who are afraid to cut spending, pare entitlements to those who don't need them, raise the actuarial presumptions about Social Security 67 years after its adoption and after the average life expectancy of participants has risen by over ten years, and other steps that will have to be taken, would resort to tokenistic fiscal persecution of the most affluent. Few living things, animal or vegetable, are more tenacious than a politician clinging to an envisioned panacea to justify the deferral of hard decisions. The country waited for the bust of the stimulus monstrosity, and then for the Simpson-Bowles report to be shelved, and for various futile and demeaning bipartisan jawbonings; if anyone took this Buffettism seriously, it would push things out into the next presidential term."

"Keynesian mysticism—with its fancy equations, its cramped vocabulary of 'liquidity traps' and 'irreducible uncertainty,' and its pre-Copernican belief that a group of wise men in a central office can decide what 'aggregate demand' should be among hundreds of millions of people—is over," writes Tim Cavanaugh at Reason.com, taking some swipes at the New York Times along the way.

Michael Greenberg comments on the post headlined Obama Calls for Rethink of Unemployment Insurance:

Here's how to get people back to work. Instead of having the government send them a check every week, match an unemployed person with an employed person and have that unemployed person meet the employed person at the employed person's place of employment every Friday, payday, at which time the employed person will hand over part of his payroll check to the unemployed person.

By doing this, we cut out the middleman and have a "Direct Transfer System" instead.

If the unemployed person wants more benefits, he can ask the employed person directly. What could possibly go wrong?

The Financial Times has a shrewd editorial on Warren Buffett's call for higher income taxes:

Mr Buffett specifies neither rates nor what kinds of income to apply them to. "People invest to make money and potential taxes have never scared them off," he says – a self-contradictory observation that suggests no ceiling. For guidance, there is the principle of "shared sacrifice". But this is vague too. What would it require in his case?

Mr Buffett's taxable income of $40m is impressively small for a man with a reported $50bn fortune. He pays next to no tax because he accumulates wealth as unrealised capital gains, which escape tax altogether. In his case, shared sacrifice probably requires a wealth tax. Set at a modest 2 per cent, he would owe about $1bn a year, or 25 times his current taxable income.

The US should do as Mr Buffett asks, and tax him till he notices.

The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney has a column with the negatives on Governor Perry: "his policies -- from backroom drug company giveaways to green energy subsidies -- eerily mirror the unseemly big business-big government collusion that has characterized President Obama's presidency. Judging by his record in Texas, Perrynomics might just be low-tax Obamanomics." Well, if the choice is between Obama's high-tax — I mean, "balanced" — Obamanomics and Perry's low-tax Obamanomics, there will be a lot of takers for the low-tax Obamanomics. And Governor Perry would probably say he sees the role of a governor as different from the role of a president, because he's for moving government power closer to the people it affects rather than centralizing it in a powerful Washington.

Anyway, if you are interested in Mr. Perry, Mr. Carney's column is worth a look as a balance to my review of Mr. Perry's book Fed Up!

The restaurant ratings site Zagat.com, which isn't usually exactly the Cato Institute, gets into the free-market spirit with a list of what it calls "The 8 Dumbest Restaurant Laws."

Remember that Reason.com forum with 15 different people on "What would you do to improve job growth?" My suggestion was "restructure the unemployment insurance program or block-grant it to the states to allow them to experiment with ways of doing so....the idea is to change the program so it creates an incentive for recipients to get a job, rather than an incentive for them to remain unemployed."

So how about this: at a town hall meeting in Atkinson, Ill., today, the president, unprompted, during the question and answer part, said:

We do also have to look at some programs, because they may not be well designed, as well designed as they could be. I'll give you an example. Unemployment insurance, the way it's designed -- it was designed back at a time when you'd have layoffs and then people would hire you back when the business cycle went back.

For all the talk about how Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility would get it vertical integration, there's still a missing piece: the carrier. What cellphone company is going to provide the service for all these new Google-Motorola phones?

There are arguments for Google to stay out of that business. The company already has antitrust hassles in search and advertising; why add them in the phone department? It can be convenient to have the cellphone carrier there to blame for the dropped calls and the unexpectedly high monthly bills. Let that anger be deflected to the carrier, and keep Google's reputation with its customers user-friendly and not "evil." Apple has succeeded in the mobile phone business without owning ATT.

"Schumer Launches Fight To End Job-Killing Tax" is the headline on a press release from the senior senator from New York, which couldn't help but grab my attention, since I'm always happy to see a Democratic leader denounce a job-killing tax.

The release explains:

This week, employers across New York were forced to pay a surcharge for each employee on the payroll in order to help the state cover its obligations in unemployment insurance. The surcharge can be as high as $21.25 per employee with the state average at approximately $18 according to the Labor Department. The state levied the surcharge to come up with the $95 million interest payment, due September 30^th, that the federal government required after the interest-free lending program from the federal unemployment fund expired.

That may sound arcane, but as a New York-based employer, it's actually concrete: I received a notice about this and had to pay that $21.25.

What makes it a Schumer classic is, first, the senator's solution: