Under the headline, "Congress' new tax grab sets a double standard," The Washington Examiner has published my op-ed piece on taxation of "carried interest." Washington Examiner readers, welcome to FutureOfCapitalism.com. Please consider bookmarking us, subscribing to our RSS feed, or signing up for our free daily mailing list. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Readers interested in the "carried interest" question may also want to check out the earlier posts on the topic here and here.

The New York Times's Nobel laureate economics columnist, Paul Krugman, has a column this morning headlined "Making Financial Reform Fool-Resistant." Mr. Krugman writes, "There should, for example, be a preset maximum level of allowable leverage — the financial reform that has already passed the House sets this at 15 to 1, and the Senate should follow suit." Check out the statistics for Mr. Krugman's employer, the New York Times Company, over at Yahoo! Finance: $36.52 million in cash and $769.22 million in debt. Yes, we know the Times Company has lots of assets other than cash. But it's something for someone whose bosses are borrowing money at 14% interest from Carlos Slim to pay themselves $6 million a year to be lecturing the country about the need to impose government limits on leverage.

One thing I didn't mention in the earlier post on the annual letter of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was the letter's glowing endorsement of Brazil. Mr. Dimon wrote:

Brazil is an example of a country that seems to be successfully using pro-growth policies to expand its economy while using the wealth from that economic growth to finance important social programs. Over the last 20 years, Brazil has adopted many policies that dramatically strengthened its economy. It also bolstered its institutions, privatized its businesses, improved the rule of law, left the bulk of capital allocation to the private capital markets and developed world-class companies.

We said it before and we'll say it again: If you think things are bad in America, they are even worse in Britain, where, the Wall Street Journal reports, "the Conservative Party's would-be Treasury minister" is assailing the compensation of a Barclay's bank executive, and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior Labour Party leader, said that the executive "hasn't earned that money. He's taken £63 million not by building business or adding value or creating long-term economic strength, he has done so by deal-making and shuffling paper around." The "long shadow of usury" strikes again.

Less than a month after the New Yorker took aim at the way "carried interest" of hedge fund, venture capital, and private equity managers is taxed, the New York Times weighs in with a Sunday editorial on the topic. Says the Times:

To add insult to injury, some hedge fund managers and, more commonly, private equity fund managers are able to pay a much lower rate of tax than the typical working professional.

The tax disparity results from an outdated rule that lets a money manager in a private partnership treat a chunk of his fees as if they were long-term capital gains, taxed at a special low rate of 15 percent. Fees for managing someone else's money should be taxed as ordinary income, like wages and salary, at rates as high as 35 percent.

The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut notices President Obama's 17-minute, 2,500-word answer to a woman who asked whether it was a "wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care" package and who said, "we are over-taxed as it is." The comments on the article are particularly hostile to Mr. Obama, especially for the Washington Post Web site, but that may be because it is the lead item on the Drudge Report.

An independent candidate for governor of Maine, Alex Hammer, is making an issue of the regulatory revolving door and conflicts of interest surrounding the expansion of wind energy in the state. One state lawmaker signed a lease with a wind company with an option for placing a turbine on his land; the wind company also hired away an aide to the governor.

We've been noting the references to "revolutionary times" in connection to the passage of ObamaCare. Now RealClearPolitics has the text of a March 31 speech by Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. Mr. Ryan called the health care law "a new Intolerable Act" and said:

Americans are preparing to fight another American Revolution, this time, a peaceful one with election ballots...but the "causes" of both are the same:

Should unchecked centralized government be allowed to grow and grow in power ... or should its powers be limited and returned to the people?

Should irresponsible leaders in a distant capital be encouraged to run up scandalous debts without limit that crush jobs and stall prosperity ... or should the reckless be turned out of office and a new government elected to live within its means?

The Washington Examiner catches a Democratic member of Congress, Rep. Hank Johnson of Georgia, questioning an admiral about whether stationing more American servicemen on Guam could cause "the whole island" to " become so overly populated it will tip over and capsize."

The Financial Times, which on March 23 was calling Google's decision to stop censoring its search results in China a "lose-lose scenario," now says, in a Question and Answer feature on Google and China: "Is its business globally likely to suffer? No. Google is estimated to earn less than 2 per cent of its revenues from China, and if anything its reputation has benefited elsewhere since its decision to reject Chinese censorship."

Disclosure: Long Google, which is up about $24 a share since I bought it March 23 after reading the FT column calling its China decision a "lose-lose scenario."

The CEO of Duke Energy Corp., Jim Rogers, says he is "offended" by the "father knows best" approach that the Democrats took in passing the health care overhaul. "Corporations are going to pay billions of dollars this year that no one even talked about in the debate and that's just the beginning," Mr. Rogers tells Bloomberg News in an interview. "The total cost of this has been significantly underestimated...We've structured something that we are going to look back on in five years and say 'how do we undo this?'"

Bloomberg says Mr. Rogers describes himself as a moderate Democrat. Lower in the article is the kicker:

The process used to pass the health-care measure is "unfortunate" because it dims prospects for getting legislation this year that would put a cap on the greenhouse-gas pollution blamed for climate change.

Duke, along with companies such as General Electric Co., has been pushing for a cap on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants, factories and other sources...

The New York Times has a report on the third staffer of Rep. Barney Frank's House Financial Services Committee in three years to leave to go work as a financial industry lobbyist. Along the way it reports that an Atlanta-based company called IntercontinentalExchange, which hired the third staffer to leave the committee, stands to gain from rules that would force more derivatives to be traded on transparent exchanges rather than in more private transactions.

Given the grief I have previously directed at Senator Grassley, President Obama, and Thomas Friedman for references to Wall Street "fat cats," it's worth noting that, unfortunately, Michael Barone, senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, and one of the best political analysts in the country, is now throwing the pejorative reference around himself. Republicans, Mr. Barone writes this morning, should oppose Senator Dodd's financial regulatory overhaul bill, and "should be prepared to argue that the Democratic bill gives vast advantages to firms whose employees have gotten huge compensation (and who, as it happens, tend to give more money to Democrats than Republicans). The cry should be, no favor to the big Wall Street fat cats." If the Republicans (and their allies at think tanks like AEI) are going to be out there demonizing Wall Street and campaigning against compensation levels in the financial industry, who needs Democrats?

In response to our item earlier this week on the president of the Carnegie Corporation, Vartan Gregorian, declaring to the New York Times that Mayor Bloomberg "shares Andrew Carnegie's notion that the person who dies rich dies disgraced, because he does not have the imagination to reinvest the money into society," a FutureOfCapitalism.com reader was kind enough to send in a copy of a page one article from the August 29, 1919, New York Times. The headline is "Carnegie's Estate, At Time of Death, About $30,000,000."

It reports, "Mrs. Carnegie receives all of her husband's real estate with his personal effects of every kind, believed to be worth between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000." Mr. Carnegie also gave annuities of "$10,000 a year to each of his married nephews and nieces," and annuities yielding the same amount to his brother-in-law and to his sister-in-law.

The point is, Mr. Gregorian's quote notwithstanding, Andrew Carnegie died rich.

James Taranto notices (second item) two liberal commentators -- Jonathan Turley and the Seattle Times editorial column -- raising questions about whether requiring an individual to buy health insurance is something the Constitution empowers the federal government to do.