The New York Times has an article about the charitable giving tax deduction in the context of the overall tax policy and deficit reduction debate:

Mr. Minarik, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, recalled being involved in putting together the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which reduced tax rates on high-income individuals. "One of the things we heard at that time was that reducing the top bracket rates would destroy the not-for-profit sector," he said.

Instead, he noted, the act reduced the value of a charitable gift to the donor by 24 percent, according to research by the nonprofit trade group Independent Sector, but the next year giving rose 10 percent.

Senator Grassley's suggestion of a two-year ban on SEC employees representing clients before their former employer got watered down in the final Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill to a mere requirement (Section 968) that the Government Accountability Office conduct a "study on SEC revolving door" that will

(1) to review the number of employees who leave the Securities and Exchange Commission to work for financial institutions regulated by such Commission;
(2) determine how many employees who leave the Securities and Exchange Commission worked on cases that involved financial institutions regulated by such Commission;
(3) review the length of time employees work for the Securities and Exchange Commission before leaving to be employed by financial institutions regulated by such Commission...

(6) determine if the volume of employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission who are later employed by financial institutions has led to inefficiencies in enforcement.

Bloomberg News has a profile of John Kinnucan, the stock analyst who says he refused to participate in an FBI operation against a client. At least two points struck me as interesting. From the Bloomberg article:

His outspokenness may come with a price.

"He's violating rule number one: don't do anything that might upset the prosecutors," said Andrew Stoltmann, a securities lawyer in Chicago.

That "rule" may be good practical advice for clients facing potential prosecution, but it doesn't exactly a encourage a robust public debate about prosecutorial tactics or the rule of law.

More:

Kinnucan, who purchased his house in an upscale part of Northeast Portland for $1.5 million in 2006, said his business is ruined. All his clients deserted him after he told them in an e-mail that the FBI had visited, something he was contractually obliged to do, he said.

The Wall Street Journal has a front-page news article on President Obama and the American ambassador to China protesting a case of "Chinese laws that classify as espionage what much of the rest of the world considers normal market research." The Journal doesn't mention it, but if prosecutors and regulators part of Mr. Obama's executive branch here in America not careful, they risk taking essentially the same approach, outlawing legitimate market research.

One other point about that New York Times editorial denouncing the "ill-gotten profits" that a hedge fund allegedly reaped by trading on "secret information." Isn't it remarkable for the Times to publish such an editorial the same week as that newspaper itself is reaping a bonanza of circulation and advertising revenue by publishing a nine-part series on the secret State Department cables obtained by Wikileaks? I'm not saying the situations are exactly the same, but there are certain parallels and differences. If you make money off secret information as a hedge fund manager, you are a crook. If you do it as a newspaper publisher, you get a Pulitzer Prize. Amazing.

The December issue of Commentary has an article by William Voegeli that runs under the headline "Americans Don't Hate the Rich." The ones who do hate the rich, the article explains, are journalists and professors jealous that their college and private school classmates are making so much more money than they are. The rest of America, meanwhile, is jealous that public employees are making so much more money than they are:

From David Leonhart's column in today's New York Times:

The second, more likely option is to extend all the tax cuts — and to package them with other tax cuts and spending likely to do more to help the economy than the Bush tax cuts. (Remember, after President George W. Bush signed the cuts in 2001, the economy lost jobs for the next two years, and economic growth during his presidency was mediocre.)

What are commonly called the "Bush tax cuts" include not only the income tax cuts passed into law in 2001 (with a phased-in implementation) but also the dividend and capital gains tax cuts of 2003, which were passed in a law that also accelerated the income tax reductions, which weren't originally supposed to take full effect until 2006. Mr. Leonhardt's argument doesn't hold water.

The New York Times today has an editorial on regulating hedge funds:

Before the 2009 financial crisis, David Skeel, an expert on financial regulation, explained that "hedge funds are best understood by what they are not. They are not regulated." Astoundingly, that is basically still true.

While the new reform law requires hedge funds to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission and gives the S.E.C. the power to inspect them, the funds can still skirt nearly all the laws regulating investment funds. They can operate largely in secret unless the S.E.C. audits them. They don't have to file quarterly financial statements, disclose what they are investing in or worry about restrictions on risky investments.

With all the ink that has been spilled over Steven Rattner's dealings with the New York State pension fund, it's astonishing (to me, at least) to discover that the investment that the Securities and Exchange Commission and the attorney general of New York are hassling Mr. Rattner over actually performed relatively well for the state pension fund.

FutureOfCapitalism.com has learned that from March 2005 to March 2009, the net internal rate of return for the Quadrangle fund in question, Quadrangle Capital Partners II, was almost flat. During this same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 27%, the S&P 500 was down 32%, and the NASDAQ was down 24%. Through the third quarter of 2008, the investment also outperformed other private equity funds that had been raised in the same year as QCPII.

From March 2005 to September 2009, QCPII's net internal rate of return was +4.6%. That's a period for which the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 8% and the S&P 500 was down 11%.

Newsweek blogger and former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in California Mickey Kaus backs not just cutting but eliminating Social Security benefits for those earning $200,000 a year or even less. He asks, "What's a better use for our money: sending retirement checks to rich people or providing modern health care to everyone?"

The "our money' formulation is a classic. Not even liberal Ted Turner buys it: "I paid for Social Security. It's my own money I'm getting back. Social Security, we get taxed for Social Security. In my opinion. I think Social Security -- since you paid for it, it's yours and you're entitled to get it."

Foreign Policy magazine is owned by the Washington Post Company, whose board of directors includes Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway owns a significant chunk of the Washington Post Company. Until very recently Melinda Gates was also on the Washington Post Company board. So guess who fetches up at the top of the list of "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers" featured in the December 2010 magazine? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, sharing the no. 1. spot, and outranking President Obama, who rates merely no. 3.

The John Abrams South Mountain Company blog has a good account of a stay at Mass General Hospital:

we were in the very best place we could be – Mass General, one of the great Harvard teaching hospitals, a place where they do these surgeries every single day....

The technology – ever-changing – is futuristic. The food – ever not – is 1956. The bread is still white, the vegetables still canned, the meat still stringy, and the mashed potatoes still runny. The menu description for Grilled Cheese Sandwich says, "A simple grilled sandwich made with American cheese on old fashioned white bread."

The New York Times columnist really doesn't like the latest Wikileaks dump, fretting that it "will probably damage the global conversation." (An editorial in the Wall Street Journal goes so far as to suggest the death penalty for the leaker.) My main reaction is that it's outrageous that the American government was keeping a lot of this stuff secret from the public in the first place.

It's not just a foreign policy question.I think Mr. Brooks is on to something when he views Wikileaks as an attack on authority. I just think that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Mr. Brooks writes: "The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted."

Into which category — order or chaos? — would Mr. Brooks place the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? The Boston Tea Party? The Soviet Communist regime?

My former New York Sun partner and colleague Seth Lipsky has a lively book review in the Wall Street Journal of Inside the Nixon Administration: The Secret Diary of Arthur Burns, 1969-1974.

An earlier post here reported on the chief utilities regulator for the state of Maine leaving to go work for a wind energy company subject to regulation by the state. Now the Martha's Vineyard Gazette reports on a somewhat similar situation in Rhode Island: