Bloomberg manages to write an entire news article on plans for a bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco to be funded by $2.3 billion in federal funds and a $10 billion state bond issue. Among the companies the Bloomberg article mentions that might benefit from the project: Alstom SA, Siemens AG, East Japan Railway Co., China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock Corp., Bombardier Inc. , Hitachi Ltd., and General Electric, which has "teamed up" with China's Ministry of Railways "in a bid to win U.S. contracts." Not mentioned, astonishingly, is Warren Buffett/Berkshire Hathaway's Burlington, Northern, and Santa Fe Railroad, which owns a lot of the track and right-of-way that is going to be used for this taxpayer-funded project to compete with privately owned airlines.

The Wall Street Journal's Peter Lattman, whose father went to summer camp with Ralph Lauren, also saw the tax angle on Ralph Lauren's sale of nearly $1 billion of his nearly $4 billion stake in Polo Ralph Lauren:

While Lauren is surely selling for diversification purposes, he's also offloading stock this year to avoid the tax hike set for 2011. On Jan. 1 the tax rate on long-term capital gains increases from 15% to 20%. Lauren presumably has virtually no cost-basis in his stock holdings. So on $1 billion worth of stock, selling now gives him an additional $50 milllion in after-tax proceeds. Look for a rush of sales in the coming months by other large holders of low-cost basis single stock positions and other long-term assets.

Mr. Lattman posted on this on June 15 at 2:42 p.m., more than a day before we got to the matter separately here. Kudos to him.

We like to cover direct mail here (see here and here for examples) because it offers a look at politicians and organizations saying things that they sometimes might not want to say in public. Today's mail delivery brought three mailings (two sent by a FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-participant-watchdog).

*From the National Rifle Association of America, a letter declaring, "Your constitutional right to own a gun is under attack by hundreds of anti-gun politicians, global gun ban diplomats at the U.N., militant anti-hunting extremists, radical billionaires and the freedom-hating Hollywood elite." "Hollywood elite" seems to be a winning phrase in right-wing direct mail; Senator Hatch uses it, too. I can never figure out whether they mean Ronald Reagan or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Money manager Clifford Asness and the CEO of the Managed Funds Association, Richard Baker, who is a former congressman, take similar approaches in their opinion pieces arguing against the proposed "enterprise value" tax that would apply ordinary income tax rates rather than long-term capital gains rates to the sale of investment services partnerships.

Here's Mr. Asness, writing for Bloomberg News:

Under the bill, part of a particular type of income earned by some investment firms, known as carried interest, might be taxed at the 35 percent rate for earned income compared with the 15 percent capital-gains rate they now pay. Fighting this change isn't our purpose here. Whether carried-interest income should be taxed as ordinary income or as capital gains is a subject of legitimate debate, typical of any business taxation issue.

He goes on to fight the enterprise value tax, having set aside the carried interest issue.

A must-read John Gapper column in the Financial Times.

The Keith Hennessey part of the new William Kristol-Keith Hennessey think tank Economic Policies for the 21st Century supports the following new rules for offshore drilling:

The Washington Examiner reports that Jamie Gorelick of the law firm Wilmer Hale, "a former Clinton Justice Department official who walked away with $26.46 million after a four year stint at Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2002," is now representing BP and accompanied its executives to their White House meeting yesterday with President Obama. Her law firm bio says she was vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1997 to 2003. It also describes her as a "frequent lecturer" on business ethics.

A Republican congressman from Louisiana, Joseph Cao, who got some attention for being the only Republican to support ObamaCare in one early vote, appeared at a Congressional hearing this morning at which the CEO of BP America, Lamar McKay, was testifying and appeared to urge him to commit suicide: "In the Asian culture we do things differently. During the Samurai days, we would just give you a knife and ask you to commit Hari-Kari." The Huffington Post has the video and the details.

Bloomberg News declares President Obama's wresting of $20 billion from BP to be a "political victory." The headline is more cautious -- "Obama May Get Boost" -- but the article itself is unequivocal: "President Barack Obama scored a political victory by pressuring BP Plc to commit $20 billion for damages from an environmental disaster." The Bloomberg editors don't seem to have been reading Larry Elder, Steve Chapman, or Rich Galen.

Jim Chanos of the short-selling hedge fund Kynikos Associates gives an interview to Bloomberg News, which reports, "Chanos said he's adding to short-sales of Ford Motor Co. as the second-biggest U.S. carmaker will struggle to compete against General Motors Co. United Auto Workers, the union that owns holdings in GM and Chrysler Group LLC, may favor those companies over Ford when negotiating upcoming labor contracts."

Bloomberg has a news article on Senator Levin's 13-year-old effort to change the tax treatment for companies that compensate employees with stock options. While Mr. Levin is quoted denouncing the current system, the wire service doesn't have any one in the article defending the current rules. "Levin estimated his bill would generate as much as $15 billion in revenue annually," the Bloomberg article says. That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that it would subtract as much as $15 billion annually from the private sector and give it to Senator Levin and his fellow politicians to spend. Given that American corporate tax rates are already high by international standards, you'd think politicians would be looking for ways to lower them rather than dreaming up ways to increase them, but Mr. Levin and Bloomberg News don't seem to see it that way.

Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post all have coverage of Ralph Lauren's plan to sell a quarter of his stake in his publicly traded Polo Ralph Lauren apparel/fashion/retail empire, with proceeds estimated at between $900 million and $1 billion. The press accounts that give a reason chalk it up to asset diversification. But, as one FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-participant-watchdog e-mailed, what the press is missing is the tax angle.

Instapundit blogger and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a "structural solution" for the supposed student lending bubble described by Steve Eisman. Professor Reynolds suggests: "Make institutions of higher education partially liable when students are unable to pay student loans. A really strict system would make the school a co-signer, but making it even 5 or 10% liable for missed payments would really change the dynamic. Give schools some skin in the game. . . ."

Interesting new column by Jonah Goldberg: "A rolling 'dead zone' off the Gulf of Mexico is killing sea life and destroying livelihoods. Recent estimates put the blob at nearly the size of New Jersey. Alas, I'm not talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. ... I'm talking about the dead zone largely caused by fertilizer runoff from American farms along the Mississippi and Atchafalaya river basins."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, writing in the Wall Street Journal: "we'd all be much better off if there were no statutory liability cap and if operators both big and small were required to purchase insurance—amounting to the tens of billions if necessary—when they operate in dangerous waters or terrains....This logic also suggests that the Price Anderson Act's $375 million cap on damages for each responsible party to cover incidents at a nuclear power facilities should be rethought."