Posting will be light to nonexistent for the rest of the day. I am going to check out some Tea Parties and will report back on them later.

Happy Tax Day. I prefer to think about where I'd like my tax dollars to go -- to the military's special forces, to the National Park rangers explaining the wonders of Ellis Island, Lexington and Concord, and Yosemite Valley, to funding my own grandparents' Medicare and Social Security payments. For a corrective, Cal Thomas has a column enumerating some of the federal expenditures that may make you feel more as if your tax dollars are being wasted, including "a commercial driving school for companies that make large profits" and research in "Pickle Science and Technology," which is "dedicated to increasing product value by improving production and quality of pickled vegetables."

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a battle between Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and Steven Roth's Vornado Realty Trust over the Vornado's lagging pace on a development on the old Filene's Basement site in Boston's Downtown Crossing. Reports the Journal:

last month, Mr. Roth sparked Mayor Menino's ire by publicly suggesting that he had intentionally let the former site of Alexander's department store lie fallow in New York City in the 1990s.

The New York Observer quoted Mr. Roth as saying at a lecture at Columbia University, "Why did I do nothing? Because I was thinking in my own awkward way that the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped, the more help they would give us when the time came."

That got Mr. Menino mad. The Journal article goes on:

It's become conventional wisdom in the press that the efficient markets hypothesis was somehow disproven by the financial crisis. For an example, see Roger Lowenstein's review in the Washington Post of Justin Fox's book:

The upside of the current Great Recession is that it could drive a stake through the heart of the academic nostrum known as the efficient-market hypothesis. This theory holds that stock and bond markets are nearly perfect -- even during such crazes as the dot-com mania -- and that prices on the exchanges instantly and accurately reflect the available information about publicly traded securities. After the market crash of 1987, Yale University economist Robert Shiller called that belief "the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory." He could have said "most harmful error" as well. Yet it lived on and contributed mightily to the mortgage bust.

As if American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein's piece this morning weren't enough, here comes another AEI fellow, Michael Barone, whose Washington Examiner dispatch appears under the headline, "GOP Should Push Tough Regulation of Wall Street."

Republicans have good policy and political reasons to argue not for weaker regulation but for tougher regulation of Wall Street firms. They should oppose resolution authority that helps the big firms and, while they're at it, seek to increase the capital requirements on such firms that are left vague in the Dodd bill. Democrats have taken the side of Wall Street. Republicans should stand up for Main Street -- and taxpayers -- instead.

Bloomberg News has an article quoting Senator Schumer saying that a more than 100% increase in the tax rate on "carried interest" on long term investment earned by managers of investment partnerships, including venture capital, private equity, real estate, and hedge funds, is "one of the things being considered" by the Senate. We've been covering the issue extensively here. Says the Bloomberg article:

In February, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the Senate Budget Committee the administration would push the tax increase and also encourage the U.K. to adopt a similar policy.

"Even though the measure doesn't produce a lot of revenue, it's good economic policy," Geithner said at the time. Investment managers shouldn't be paying less in taxes than firefighters, he said.

AOL News has published an opinion piece I wrote about the idea of a national value-added tax, under the headline: "How Bad Is the VAT? Let Me Count the Ways." The other four people AOL News asked for their opinions on the VAT -- Donald Marron, Isabel Sawhill, Henry Aaron, and Veronique de Rugy -- all have Ph.Ds, so it's interesting to read all the pieces and see how mine compares.

Free-market-oriented donors to the American Enterprise Institute recently relieved themselves of David Frum. But they are still employing Norman Ornstein, who has an op-ed piece in this morning's Washington Post attacking his AEI colleague Newt Gingrich.

Mr. Ornstein writes that "charges of radicalism, socialism, retreat and surrender" leveled at the Obama administration by Mr. Gingrich and others "are, frankly, bizarre."

More: "The stimulus was anything but radical -- indeed, many mainstream observers, me included, thought it was too timid in size and scope given the enormity of the problems."

More: "Looking at the range of Obama domestic and foreign policies, and his agency and diplomatic appointments, my conclusion is clear: This president is a mainstream, pragmatic moderate, operating in the center of American politics; center-left, perhaps, but not left of center."

David Leonhardt has a column in the New York Times arguing that the commonly cited statistic that 47% of households will owe no federal income tax relies on "a cleverly selective reading of the facts." His column, which calls for increased taxes, mainly on upper income individuals, is also a selective reading of the facts, though.

Some morning links:

Michael Barone says Republicans have a shot at the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut.

Timothy Carney says that President Obama's praise of Justice John Paul Stevens as someone who knows that "knows that in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens" overlooks Justice Stevens's vote in Kelo v. New London, where ordinary citizens had their homes taken by the government "for use by real estate developers at the request of the largest drug company in America."

John Stossel has a column about taxes, reporting that the federal income tax began in 1913 at a level of "just 1 percent on incomes between $20,000 and $50,000. Those were big incomes -- adjusted for inflation, $50,000 is $1.1 million today. The top bracket paid 6 percent, but that only applied to people who earned at least $11 million." More: "In 1913, the first tax form and instructions totaled four simple pages. Today's 1040, with instructions, totals 176 pages. How did this happen? Because politicians win votes by giving gifts to favored groups."

Brent Bozell writes about a Media Research Center study that "found only 19 news stories on the Tea Party movement for the entire year on ABC, CBS and NBC. The Obama family dog received more attention."

The seizure of Washington Mutual and its delivery into the hands of JPMorgan Chase has always struck us an example of reckless regulatory overreach. So it was interesting to read today the testimony of WaMu's chief executive officer for 18 years, Kerry Killinger, on the bank's demise. The early press accounts of Mr. Killinger's testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission are mostly full of derision. For an antitode, try reading his actual testimony. The key portions are here:

"500 American citizens and green card holders in the last quarter of 2009 said goodbye to America forever. Not many, but double the number of expatriations in all of 2008," writes Bill Frezza, a partner at Adams Capital Management, an early-stage venture capital firm. I think his suggestions on what to do about the issue, including "lean on foreign governments to deny economic defectors citizenship" and "pass enough laws to make sure that no one is allowed to get rich in the first place" are intended tongue-in-cheek.

Mr. Frezza also take note of the "carried interest" issue that we've been paying attention to here. His formulation: "Congress is trying to triple the taxes hedge fund managers, private equity firms, and venture capitalists pay on their gains."

In response to the earlier post about AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka's Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for more regulation of private equity, a FutureOfCapitalism.com reader writes to note the asymmetry of Mr. Trumka's argument that one of the reasons more regulation is required is that some companies have gone bankrupt and investors have lost money. In many companies investors lose money, but you hardly ever hear that the employees who got paid (other than bankers or AIG traders) should somehow be regulated, give back money they were paid or subject themselves to regulation because they "profited" off the investors who lost their money.

Somehow the framework of investors free to invest and individuals free to work or quit has gotten lost over the years.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post: "Our latest estimate conservatively puts the cost of TARP at $117 billion, and if Congress adopts the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee that the president proposed in January, the cost to American taxpayers will be zero."

Who does Mr. Geithner think it is who will be paying this "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee"? Do the owners of financial instititions who would be subject to this "fee" -- a polite word for what is actually arguably not a fee but a tax -- not count as American taxpayers?

In his initial blog post yesterday afternoon on the announcement of this year's Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times referred to the winner in the commentary category, Kathleen Parker, as "a conservative political columnist." By the time the news was edited for the print edition of the newspaper, Ms. Parker was simply "a political columnist."

Just how conservative is Ms. Parker? I don't read her regularly, so I spent some time this morning having a look at her prize-winning columns.

Exhibit A: "Whatever Voinovich's sound effects were intended to convey, his meaning was clear enough: Those ignorant, right-wing, Bible-thumping rednecks are ruining the party.