If you are undecided about whether Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been unfairly harsh on Steven Rattner in the New York state pension fund investigation, check out the settlement he just reached with Albany lobbyist Patricia Lynch. She pays a $500,000 fine and agrees to a 5-year ban on contact with the state comptroller's office, for conduct that seems far worse than anything Mr. Rattner did. The attorney general, by contrast, is seeking from Mr. Rattner at least $26 million and a lifetime ban from the securities industry in New York.

What accounts for the different treatment? The New York Times front-page article today on the Lynch-Cuomo settlement doesn't even raise the question, let alone answer it. The Times article also today does not mention that Ms. Lynch gave four campaign contributions to Mr. Cuomo in 2006 totaling $8,000, while Mr. Rattner gave not a cent.

Daniel Henninger has a Wall Street Journal column on taxes, President Obama, and class warfare:

if an angry, let-me-be-clear Barack Obama just looked into the cameras and said he's coming to get you in two years, what rational economic choice would you make? Spend the profit or gains 2011 might produce on new workers, or bury any new income in the backyard until the 2012 presidential clouds clear?

By a vote of 324 to 81, the House of Representatives late this afternoon passed a bill cracking down on companies that offer cash for gold. It's cutely called the "Guarantee of a Legitimate Deal," or GOLD Act of 2010. It strikes me as part of a broader effort by Congress to counter gold, both because of the threat it imposes to the fiat dollar as a competing standard of value, and because of the way gold companies support right-of-center radio and television (and even some Web sites) with advertising.

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Mayor Bloomberg offered some red meat for free-market types like me in his big economic policy speech this morning:

Despite what ideologues on the left believe, government cannot tax and spend its way back to prosperity, especially when that spending is driven by pork barrel politics....

Building confidence is a big part of getting the private sector to invest. There is much pessimism in the system because there is much uncertainty about what Washington might or might not do - on taxes, regulations, and policies. And that uncertainty breeds economic paralysis. Banks have money but are reluctant to loan. Businesses have money but are reluctant to invest in new equipment or new hires. Families, fearing a double-dip recession, are reluctant to spend. The potential for progress is there but nothing is happening. Why? Because government solutions ooze ambiguity.

An article in the Financial Times reports that Blackstone Group chief executive Stephen Schwarzman "spent 200 days last year away from the group's New York base" and is preparing "to spend much of the next six months outside the US, mostly in Paris." The FT chalks this up to "a personal decision, partly influenced by a request by his wife." Maybe so. But, though the FT does not mention it, it's hard not to imagine that tax planning also played a role. Every time some left wing New York City politician suggests increasing city or state taxes on millionaires to increase the city and state tax revenues, they neglect the fact that rich people like Mr. Schwarzman or Julian Robertson are perfectly capable of traveling. Two hundred days is enough to get you past the New York city and state "day-count" test.

The chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, has an op-ed piece in the Financial Times floating the following idea: "It would, for instance, be possible to set a rule that no board member or senior executive of a failing bank will be allowed to perform a similar function at a bank unless they can positively demonstrate to the regulator that they warned against and sought to reduce the risk-taking that led to failure."

It would be "possible" to set similar rules for regulators and central bankers, too, but Lord Turner doesn't suggest that. Imagine trying to run a bank amid the proliferation of cover-your-rear type memos that such a rule would spawn.

"The big takeaway from the tax deal is that elections have consequences." — FutureOfCapitalism.com, "The Tax Deal," December 7, 2010, 3:09 p.m.

"As he likes to say, elections have consequences." — Final sentence, Wall Street Journal editorial on the tax deal, December 8, 2010.

It's the second time in less than a month that this has happened.

A column in the New York Times, discussing the possibility of a primary challenge from the left against President Obama, observes, "it probably isn't coincidental that none of the last four American presidents to face primaries while seeking re-election — Johnson, Gerald R. Ford, Carter and George H. W. Bush — survived to serve another term."

The Times doesn't mention it, but there's a chance that a primary from the left might help President Obama by making him appear more centrist and less left-wing. For me, the presence of John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich and even on some issues (individual mandate for health insurance) Hillary Clinton in the Democratic debates and primaries in 2008 had that effect for Mr. Obama.

There's more to be said about the Andrew Cuomo-Steven Rattner situation, and I will do so sometime soon. But until then, today's front-page New York Times article is really a classic. The Cuomo camp deals with the Rattner camp's complaint that it is an unfair prosecution by leaking to the Times that it might go after Mr. Rattner for perjury? Think about this for a minute. If Mr. Cuomo wants to charge Mr. Rattner with perjury, he can go ahead and do that and take his chances in court. But leaking and hinting to the Times, in essence, that if Mr. Rattner doesn't settle the civil charges against him, Mr. Cuomo might go after him for perjury is exactly the sort of bullying prosecutorial behavior that Mr. Rattner's allies are upset about to begin with. The Times article, rather than dispelling those concerns about how Mr. Cuomo and his office have handled the matter, compounds them. The Times reporters, alas, seem not to comprehend this.

Individual recipients of unemployment insurance have their benefits capped at 99 weeks, notwithstanding the 13 months of "extended unemployment" that is part of the Obama-McConnell tax deal. The extension applies to the program under which people can claim 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, not to the number of weeks an individual claimant gets the benefits. At least that's what the Tax Foundation says.

The Treasury Department press release announcing the government's exit of its Citigroup shares makes much of the fact that the government made a $12 billion "profit" on the investment. Says the release: "Treasury invested a total of $45 billion in Citigroup pursuant to the TARP (and made a $5 billion commitment under the Asset Guarantee Program that was never funded). With this offering, Treasury has recovered all of the $45 billion plus approximately $12.0 billion in profits consisting of, dividends, interest and gain on the sale of Citigroup common stock and other securities."

The big takeaway from the tax deal is that elections have consequences. Anyone who predicted back in November or December of 2008 that two years later, President Obama would be extending the Bush income tax, capital gains, and dividend tax rates for two years while also cutting the payroll tax by two percentage points would probably have been greeted with a lot of skepticism. But the 2010 election turning the House of Representatives over to the Republicans and increasing Republican numbers in the Senate made such a deal possible.

At least two other points are worth mentioning. The first is that whatever lip service both parties pay to deficit reduction, this deal doesn't exactly place a priority on it. I've never bought the idea that tax cuts have to be "paid for," and I'm hopeful that economic growth will reduce the deficit, but even so, this is not a pretty deal from a deficit reduction standpoint.

Bloomberg News's Matthew Lynn has a column skeptical of all the antitrust cases that the European Union has been bringing lately against American technology companies:

What exactly is the European Union's beef with America's best technology companies?

Last week, the EU opened an investigation into Google Inc. for allegedly discriminating against competing services in its search results. Last year, it hit Intel Corp. with a 1.06 billion euro ($1.33 billion) fine. Earlier this decade, Microsoft Corp. got socked with a fine by the EU of almost 500 million euros....

the EU's trust-busters don't seem to have much of a clue as to the difference between a monopoly and a really, really successful company....IBM looked like a monopoly for a long time, before getting whacked by Microsoft and a host of companies that could make computers cheaper. Then Microsoft looked all-powerful, until the arrival of Google and the revival of Apple Inc. Google may seem dominant now, but Facebook is gaining ground fast....

One more point on the press reports of "insider trading," which I am tempted to start referring to as "outsider trading," because they don't appear to involve any persons you'd think of as classic insiders: The New York Times was reporting on some of these activities — particularly the consulting by doctors — five years ago, and I was blogging in defense of it. If the activity is so problematic and so well known, why has it taken the government five years to get on the case? There's something strange about the whole thing.