From a Bloomberg News article on business reaction to the primary election results:

Some of the June 8 results make business leaders nervous, raising concerns that both parties are moving toward more rigid ideological positions. Angle, for example, wants the federal Education Department eliminated and has called for the current tax code to be scrapped -- views shared by many Tea Party activists.

"This kind of extremism makes it much harder to plan from a business perspective," said John Castellani, chief executive officer of the Business Roundtable, which represents chief executives.

The retiring leader of Britain's Tesco supermarket chain is one of ten people who most helped the poor in the past few decades, a Times of London op-ed (cumbersome registration process required) argues: "Today's supermarket customers eat considerably better than the Queen ate 50 years ago. Supermarket shelves are laden with food that is fresh, varied and affordable....Food prices fell by nearly 10 per cent in the 1990s and by a further 8 per cent in the past decade....Supermarkets have also been enormous job creators. Tesco created one new job every 20 minutes in the Noughties."

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Kevin Drum, writing in, of all places, Mother Jones:

Lefty economists might generally believe that increasing spending is a more efficient way of stimulating consumption than reducing taxes, but they'd almost certainly accept a big tax cut as an almost-as-good substitute. And tax cuts have two big advantages over spending. On the substantive side, they work faster. Spending takes time to work its way through the economy, but a tax cut (for example, a payroll tax holiday) boosts the economy almost immediately. And on the political side it's quite doable. Republicans would be persuadable because they love tax cuts and Democrats would be persuadable because it would help the economy. For Obama, then, it would be the best of all worlds: a fast stimulus that gets bipartisan support, something that boosts the economy while dampening the inevitable criticism he'd get for blowing up the deficit.

Just a friendly reminder to those of you who haven't yet become paying members or subscribers of FutureOfCapitalism: Please do so soon if you'd like a copy of the quarterly report, which is delivered only to paying customers. The online transaction will just take a minute or two of your time, and the price at the entry level is less than $1 a week. The link is here.

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Steven Rattner has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal describing the skeptical reception he got at the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference when he said income inequality was to blame for the anger at Wall Street. He was booed. Mr. Rattner writes: "I was dumbfounded. Was he seriously questioning my suggestion that 30,000 Americans should not command a full 6% of income in this country (a higher percentage than at even the end of the Roaring '20s)?"

A FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-participant-community member-watchdog who actually attended the conference has part of the story that Mr. Rattner didn't share. When Mr. Rattner made his complaint about income inequality, he used the word "gets," as in, 30,000 Americans shouldn't "get" 6% of the income. When he was followed by the next speaker, Larry Robbins of Glenview Capital, Mr. Robbins pointedly corrected Mr. Rattner: I think you meant "earns," not "gets." The crowd cheered.

William Kristol and Keith Hennessey have launched a new non-profit economic policy think tank called Economic Policies for the 21st Century, with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. Its projects include a health care Web site called ObamaCare Watch.

From the "about us" page: "We are supportive of free markets while recognizing the need to devise and implement a reasonable structure of law and regulation that will help ensure our financial markets avoid a catastrophic event in the future. ...The analysis at e21 will be deeply grounded in empirical evidence, not ideology."

First President Obama got rid of the Winston Churchill bust. Now, after British Petroleum's involvement in the oil spill, the United States has reportedly joined in a unanimous vote in the Organization of American States to ask Britain to "re-open" talks with Argentina on sovereignty over the Falklands Islands, which Britain controls and where a British company, Rockhopper, wants to develop a recent oil find.

The OAS Web site has a link to a download of the text of the resolution, which hasn't received much attention in either the British or American press. Here it is:

DECLARATION ON THE QUESTION OF THE MALVINAS ISLANDS

(Adopted at the fourth plenary session, held on June 8, 2010)

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY,

CONSIDERING its repeated statements that the Question of the Malvinas Islands is a matter of enduring hemispheric concern;

The German government has rejected a request by General Motors for $1.3 billion in aid for Opel, Bloomberg reports. And here we'd thought GM had "repaid in full" its government aid.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes: "This administration is heavily staffed by academics, lawyers and political types. There is no senior person who has run a large company or built and sold globally a new innovative product. And that partly explains why this administration has been mostly interested in pushing taxes, social spending and regulation — not pushing trade expansion, competitiveness and new company formation." Mr. Friedman proposes cuts in the payroll, corporate income, and capital gains tax rates.

Peter Osnos reminds us of the dynamism in capitalism: "Facebook, with 450 million users, is barely six years old. So is YouTube. Google has been around for less than decade as a public company. And yet these brand names, and products like the iPhone, iPod, and Kindle have become standard features in our society....we see now is really a snapshot. If there is as much change in the next ten years as there has been in the past decade, then iconic brands of the moment may be replaced by gadgets and networks being devised right now by some graduate student in a garage."

The New York Times has an article highlighting the peculiarities of the beer tax. It applies to "small brewers" -- those who make fewer than 2 million barrels a year -- at $7 a barrel for the first 60,000 barrels and $18 a barrel for each additional barrel. Senators Kerry and Crapo are sponsoring a bill to raise the definitional limit of a small brewer to 6 million barrels and cut the tax to $3.50 a barrel for the first 60,000 and $16 a barrel for additional barrels. Large brewers now pay $18 a barrel on everything.

Holman Jenkins, in the middle of a column speculating that BP is going to be the target of a Chrysler or GM-style politicized bankruptcy: "Let's even doubt whether this is wholly a political disaster for President Obama. We live in a historical moment that plainly calls for reforming the welfare state and restoring our economy's dynamism. He has spent two years trying to expand entitlements and raise taxes."

"In a move that could escalate trade tensions between the U.S. and China, the Department of Commerce found that Chinese drill-pipe makers were selling roughly $200 million of pipes in the U.S. for less than their market value," the Wall Street Journal reports. If the Chinese want to sell Americans stuff extra cheaply, why not just let them? The Journal article says domestic steel makers don't like the competition, but no one selling more expensive products likes competition.

The Wall Street Journal has an update on the effort to raise taxes on managers of investment partnerships. The latest twist isn't just raising the rates on "carried interest," but imposing new taxes on firms that go public: "The Senate plan—slightly milder than a House bill passed last week—also includes what is known as an 'enterprise-value tax' provision. It would tax the sale of a private-equity firm, hedge fund and real-estate partnership at higher rates....The section of the bill that most rankles financiers is the enterprise-value tax. Lawyers and lobbyists for investment-management partnerships describe the provision as punitive and having no precedent. The sale of a grocery store, manufacturer or bank would still be taxed at lower capital-gains rates."

Press who didn't get enough fun at Biden's Beach Bash can head to the G20 summit in Canada, where they will be greeted with a press center featuring a $1.8 million artificial lake "complete with canoes and a bar," Reuters reports.