New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has a column in today's New York Times under the headline "Taxes and Billionaires."

He writes: "financiers have gotten away with paying a lower tax rate than their chauffeurs or personal trainers. Tycoons have bet for years that the public is too stupid or distracted to note that in many cases they're paying just a 15 percent tax rate." This distorts the issue. In fact those in the 15% income tax bracket — up to $69,000 a family — pay a capital gains rate of only 10%, less than the 15% rate paid by "tycoons" on their capital gains.

Mr. Kristof suggests that John Paulson is a big beneficiary of this tax break. But many of Mr. Paulson's and his fund's holdings are in gold, which is mostly taxed at a higher "collectibles" rate, not the lower 15% rate.

Mr. Kristof's article relies largely on the work of Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The University of Colorado, Boulder is a state institution that doesn't pay any income tax at all at the corporate level.

Press release of the day, from the State Department, issued late yesterday, under the headline "Persecution of Religious Minorities in Iran":

We are dismayed over reports that the Iranian courts are requiring Youcef Nadarkhani to recant his Christian faith or face the death penalty for apostasy – a charge based on his religious beliefs. If carried out, it would be the first execution for apostasy in Iran since 1990.

He is just one of thousands who face persecution for their religious beliefs in Iran, including the seven leaders of the Baha'i community whose imprisonment was increased to 20 years for practicing their faith and hundreds of Sufis who have been flogged in public because of their beliefs.

While Iran's leaders hypocritically claim to promote tolerance, they continue to detain, imprison, harass, and abuse those who simply wish to worship the faith of their choosing.

President Obama did a town hall this afternoon with questions from Twitter. Highlights (or lowlights, depending on how you see it.): The president claims "collective bargaining is why workers enjoy...weekends." I've seen the bumper sticker about labor unions...the folks who brought you the weekend, as has, apparently, the president. But when you get right down to it, isn't the reason there are weekends that the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments, says that the seventh day is a sabbath and not to work on it?

Mr. Obama spoke of dealing with the problem of underwater home mortgages by "putting some pressure" on banks, prompting a Twitter user to ask, "Is free-market an option?" Mr. Obama replied, "most of this is free market."

Would investing in companies that have close relationships with the Obama administration be a good tactic, or a money loser?

That's the question I tried to answer with the Crony Capitalist Index, first calculated back in February. It was a test of whether companies that cozy up to the White House actually create value for their shareholders, perhaps by using the power of the government to their advantage, or whether they destroy value, perhaps seeking the president's favor only because they've exhausted the other methods of successfully competing in the marketplace.

On the first calculation, there did seem to be some outperformance by companies whose executives were invited to state dinners at the White House or named to certain presidential advisory boards. The midyear point seemed a good time to review the data again, adding some newly created presidential panels and incorporating the companies whose executives were guests at President Obama's fourth state dinner, for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, on June 7.

Foster Friess has a nifty follow-up to that Richard Stengel-Time magazine piece on the Constitution that Thomas Sowell wrote about the other day. Mr. Friess has quotes from James Madison rebutting Time. The key principle is what Madison called "enumerated powers."

Mayor Bloomberg has been doing a fine job of defending Walmart's right to open a store in New York City, but a New York Times news article overstates it some when it refers to Mr. Bloomberg as "a longtime defender of free-market principles." Was he defending free-market principles when he backed the use of eminent domain to seize private property for subsidized housing and a basketball arena at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn? When he banned trans-fats in restaurants? When he banned smoking in bars and restaurants? When he backed a ban on campaign contributions from limited liability partnerships and limited liability companies but not labor unions? When he backed an extension of $1 billion a year in sales taxes that were set to expire?

For the second time in a month I've got an issue with Ramesh Ponnuru's Bloomberg View column. This time around, Mr. Ponnuru writes about the Supreme Court: "The court ought to be pro- business. It shouldn't twist the law to serve the interests of corporations. But there's no getting around the fact that the promotion of commerce -- and particularly its protection from politicians in the states who would exploit or block it -- was a major reason we replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution in the first place....The real answer to whether we have a pro-business court, then, is no -- and more's the pity."

The situation involving St. Joe, which is a Florida land company, and its shareholder the Fairholme mutual fund led by Bruce Berkowitz, is a drama we have been following here for some time (see the earlier posts here, here, and here.) The latest development is that St. Joe shares are down about 6% this morning, on the July 1 after-close news that the SEC had launched a formal investigation of St. Joe.

The American Revolution Center has published an essay I wrote on the 1772 "Rights of the Colonists," which, along with some of the other material on the center's site, may be of interest on Independence Day.

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, editors at Reason magazine and its Web sites, are out with a new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, making the case that "we are in fact living at the cusp of what can only be called the libertarian moment."

"The era of big government will not come to an end because libertarians have won a political argument. It is coming — and soon — because politicians spent their way to the brink of a massive fiscal shock," they write. "We are out of money."

The authors tell their story with a slew of analogies, examples, and case studies drawn from business and popular culture. They offer Macy's and Gimbels, Kodak and Fujifilm, General Motors and Ford in 1975 as evidence that "duopolies — even, or especially, those we most take for granted — not only can but do change all the time."

BankSimple, a start-up bank emphasizing, as its name suggests, simplicity, was the subject of a post here back in March 2010, which noted that Bank of America was also introducing a wave of "basic" products for customers sick of gimmickry and red tape from their banks.

BankSimple still has not yet launched to customers, but Citibank is moving to steal, or copy, or pre-empt, depending on how you look at it, the "simple" branding of its would-be-competitor. Citi has launched a web site called Citisimplicity.com and even registered City Simplicity as a service mark. An ATM-screen based ad for the product reads: "I like the simple things in life. My credit card, for example." The Citigroup home page touts the firm as "creating the best outcome for our clients with financial solutions that are simple, creative, and responsible."

One more point about that Oxford/United Health Care rate increase I posted about earlier. What it is, actually, is an application to the New York State Insurance Department for an increase. This is a great example of how government price controls don't always actually work well to moderate prices. Because the insurance department exists in part to moderate price increases for consumers, the insurance companies are tempted to go in, as a bargaining technique, with a big proposed rate increase, which they anticipate will then get knocked down by the regulators and politicians, who can then claim credit for "standing up" for the consumer. The regulators and consumers might claim that without their intervention, the insurer would raise rates by the asked-for-20% rather than by the eventually-approved 10%. That's possible. But it's also possible that if the insurance company hadn't been forced to go through the whole charade, the company might just have raised the rate 10% in the first place.

At RealClearPolitics, Jon Entine has more on that New York Times piece from over the weekend about natural gas, the one we posted about earlier here. Mr. Entine writes:

When I emailed the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas about the Times' representation that she was on an "advisory committee" and was a "commissioner," spokesperson James Hoard corrected the record: She is an unpaid volunteer member of the "small business and agriculture advisory council (not 'committee'), which is composed of professionals primarily representing small business and agriculture . . . local citizens who provide input into regional business conditions. (Ms. Rogers is a cheese producer.)," he wrote. Hoard added that she has no "governance or policy responsibilities." The two former chairs instrumental in appointing her are executives in the oil industry: Jim Hackett at Anadarko Petroleum and Ray Hunt at Hunt Consolidated.

If ObamaCare is bending the health-care cost curve downward, I'm not seeing it. United Health Care just sent me a letter telling me it is seeking approval from the New York State Insurance department for a 21.9% increase in my 2012 health insurance premiums over 2011, which were already up 9% over 2010, the year that President Obama signed the ironically named "Affordable Care Act" into law.

Under the headline, "Prescriptions to Revive Recovery," the economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, David Wessel, endorses a list of ideas to spur economic growth in America that are almost comically bad.