FutureOfCapitalism.com reader Frederick Van Bennekom writes:

In my business, I run workshops that are typically paid for with credit cards. Because of the dollar amount, I typically get a 1099 from the customer's company. My credit card processor, Elavon, just requested a W9 from me due to a new requirement for them to report my sales to the IRS.

This will lead to double counting on the 1099s. If I sell $50,000 of workshops in a year, the IRS may now get 1099s for $100,000. We all know that the 1099 income reported to the IRS should not exceed the revenue we claim on our taxes. In my business with this new reporting, I will almost certainly have 1099 income exceed my revenue. Thus, I'll likely be flagged for audit -- because the geniuses in Congress don't understand how businesses function. The saving grace may be that a lot of people will be in my situation, overtaxing -- pun intended -- the IRS auditors.

The American Public Health Association declares in its newsletter that the election of Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts was a "debacle." The non-profit organization of public health professionals is considering "a daily 'body count' of people who lose their lives for want of medical care that would continue until legislation passed. While this would be complex to carry out, APHA members would be urged to participate in a massive effort to get Congress off the dime and overcome the paralysis keeping complete health reform gridlocked."

One point made by Paul Krugman in that New Yorker profile: "That's everybody's challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it." Robert Litan has an answer, reports David Warsh.

Nobel prizewinning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has a condominium in St. Croix, a large house in Princeton, N.J., and an apartment in New York. His wife, who edits his writing, "was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England." He's a science fiction fan with two cats and no children. He "pulled out of the stock market ten years ago and never went back," though he does hold some Ford Motor bonds. This all is told in a New Yorker magazine profile.

The "President's Proposal" for a health care overhaul, released today, includes some hefty tax increases. Here are links to a few from the White House Web site. An increased Medicare payroll tax: "The Act will include an additional 0.9 percentage point Hospital Insurance tax for households with incomes exceeding $200,000 for singles and $250,000 for married couples filing jointly. In addition, it would add a 2.9 percent tax for such high-income households to unearned income including interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents (excluding income from active participation in S corporations)." It's hard to see how President Obama, a bestselling author himself, considers royalties to be unearned income, unless you buy American Thinker's theory that Bill Ayers did a lot of the work on Dreams From My Father. And it'll be interesting to see whether this tax on "unearned income" includes interest on Treasury bills and on municipal bonds. The current 15% tax rate on dividends is scheduled to expire at the end of 2010, and it'll be interesting to see if the Obama 2.9% tax is added to the top of another increase. Won't this tax increase be reflected in a decline in the value of rent-paying and dividend-paying assets, i.e., commercial real estate and the stock market? There's a tax on policies with premiums above $27,500 a year for families, a tax the law imposes "beginning in 2018," by which time Mr. Obama will, conveniently, be out of office and therefore not liable for any political fallout from the tax. If this tax is such a swell idea, why wait eight years to impose it? And why do the $250,000-a-year couples with dividend income get socked with their tax increase immediately, while the union guys with Cadillac health plans get a tax holiday until 2018? There are taxes on prescription drugs, medical devices, health insurance companies, and indoor tanning services. The White House characterizes the taxes on the drug companies and the health insurers as "fees."

One of the themes we've been sounding around here is that as government takes a bigger role in health care it also is going to start intervening in areas, like salt, obesity, or smoking, that were once the province of individual free choice. Before you know it, the federal government is going to start redesigning hot dogs. Seriously, from Yahoo! News: "The leading group of pediatricians in the United States is pushing for a redesign of common foods such as hot dogs and candies, along with new warning labels placed on food packaging, to help curb sometimes fatal incidents of child choking." The article quotes Dr. Gary Smith, immediate-past chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention, as saying, "We have a number of laws and regulations that help prevent choking due to toys. There are no such similar regulations for food." The Food and Drug Administration is on the case. Maybe it'd be easier to just redesign the childrens' windpipes and leave the hot dogs alone.

"Capitalism is collapsing," the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared today in Tehran, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency. Like Osama Bin Laden, Ahmadinejad is not a fan of capitalism, a reminder that the enemies of America, of Israel, and of the Jews are also often enemies of capitalism.

The chief executive of the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Delos "Toby" Cosgrove, did an interview with Fortune magazine about health care and "reform." The clinic doesn't hire new employees who are smokers and even goes as far as including a test for nicotine with the drug test for new employees. "We test all new employees for nicotine, as well as drugs, as part of their employment physical. It's very interesting what you can do with that sort of thing, and it's completely legal," Dr. Cosgrove says. When I was hiring at the New York Sun I never went so far as giving a nicotine test, but I sometimes asked job applicants if they smoked. To me the issue wasn't that they'd get sick. It was that New York had basically banned smoking in the workplace, so smokers were having to leave the office and go stand outside and smoke. Instead of being at their desks working, the employees would be outside smoking. What do you think? Is it reasonable for a business to refuse to hire smokers? Should health care businesses like the Cleveland Clinic have different, stricter standards for employee health than other businesses? If the government pays for more health care under ObamaCare, will it be justified in taking a heavier hand in decisions, like diet, exercise, smoking, or even how much sleep you get each night, that are often seen as matters of individual free choice? The comments thread is open.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Geithner comes off as airing some frustration with the American public. "The thing that's been the hardest, is to help people understand what we're trying to do," he said, echoing an earlier comment he had made that banker bonuses are "very hard for people to understand." There is a kind of resonance between this and Jacob Weisberg's complaint about "the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large." And a similarity to President Obama's comment in his State of the Union address that on health care, "I take my share of blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people." I said about the State of Union that Mr. Obama's comments made those skeptical of ObamaCare sound like dense students who, if they had only had a teacher who could explain quadratic equations to them more clearly, might not have flunked math. Mr. Geithner's comments betray some of the same attitude. If the American people don't understand what Mr. Geithner or Mr. Obama are doing, maybe it isn't such a good idea for them to do it.

In posts here and here, I linked high tax rates in Greece to tax evasion there. In response, Commenter Ben asked, "Is there a study that shows higher taxes lead to tax evasion?" Sure enough, there is a new working paper just out from the National Bureau of Economic Research, based on a study of 40,000 individual income tax filers in Denmark. "Using bunching evidence around large and salient kink points of the nonlinear income tax schedule, we find that marginal tax rates have a positive impact on tax evasion," the study says, while acknowledging, "this effect is small in comparison to avoidance responses." Whether the taxes are avoided (legal) or evaded (illegal) doesn't make that much difference for our purposes; the point is that governments can't just keep raising marginal tax rates and expect the action not to affect the base of declared revenue upon which the taxes are levied.

Bloomberg News has an article out this morning headlined "Republicans Voting Against Stimulus Then Asked Obama for Money," an article that at first blush looks like a straightforward, garden-variety Washington hypocrisy story. What's not transparent is where the idea for the article came from. Could the article perhaps have been inspired by the Obama administration itself, which, only days before the Bloomberg article appeared, posted an item on the White House blog headlined, "Opponents of Recovery Act Take Credit for Impact of Bill They Voted Against," citing similar stories that appeared in other newspapers. Is it just a coincidence that these stories all appeared at once on the anniversary of the Recovery Act? Faulting a Republican congressman for asking for government money for his district is a little like faulting a Democratic congressman who voted against a tax cut for failing, after the cut takes effect, to keep paying his own taxes voluntarily at the previous, pre-cut rate. Yet you haven't seen a lot of Bloomberg articles faulting President Obama for failing voluntarily to pay himself the higher tax rate he wants to impose on others. In fact, the hypocrisy of the Republican congressmen in these cases is probably even less egregious than in the tax cut case, because the Republicans can reasonably say that if the money isn't spent on their projects in their districts, it isn't going to be saved, it's just going to be spent elsewhere, and possibly wasted, so they might as well participate and try to have the money spent as widely as possible. In any event, it's a good reminder as a reader, when reading a news article, to ask yourself who the story might benefit. The press is a big advocate of transparency when it comes to public institutions, but it's rarely transparent itself when it comes to the sources of its stories.

An economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Brad DeLong, calls Russ Roberts the "lyingist economist alive." Mr. Roberts, a professor at George Mason University, defends himself here. Professor Roberts recently sent me a copy of his novel The Price of Everything, and in looking through it before this fight broke out, I was surprised, given Mr. DeLong's left-wing reputation and Mr. Roberts's free-market proclivities, to find that in the "further reading" section of the novel Mr. Roberts writes, "On economic growth, read Brad DeLong's unpublished essay, 'Cornucopia: Increasing Wealth in the Twentieth Century.' It's full of fascinating data and insights into the transformation of our standard of living." Mr. Roberts calls Mr. DeLong's work fascinating and insightful and recommends people read it; Mr. DeLong responds by calling him a liar. Weird, even for academics or economists. They seem to be fighting about climate change, which may explain some of why Mr. DeLong is so hot under the collar.

Seen on a recent Citibank statement: "Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change."

Whoa. Is this an April Fool's joke? A contingency plan to defend against the idea of what "would happen if thousands of [bank] customers pledge to withdraw their money from the bank on a certain day, unless the bonuses are capped?" A strategem cooked up by Citi's new shareholders from the hedge fund industry, an industry in which such withdrawal gates are common? An idea backed by Citi's big shareholder, Uncle Sam, or one of its regulators, Sheila Bair?

The WellPoint Anthem Blue Cross premium increase in California, which we first flagged here in a post back on February 10, is turning into a big national issue, with the Wall Street Journal weighing in yesterday and, today, the New York Times coming in with both an editorial and a Paul Krugman column making the point that the increase shows why national health reform is necessary. The Times echoes the White House, which calls the increases "huge" and "outrageous." The Times editorial calls the increases "huge" and says customers were "understandably furious." The Krugman column also uses the word "huge" -- twice, actually -- and concludes, "inaction isn't an option. Congress and the president need to make reform happen — now."

The Democrats claim to be the party of the working man and woman. But their elected officials have a taste for luxury living. The New York Sun wrote in an October 17, 2006 editorial, "Reid of the Ritz," commenting on news that the Democratic Party's leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has as his Washington residence a condominium in the Ritz Carlton:

The Democrats, who tout themselves as the party of the common man, are rapidly turning into the party of the plutocrats. The Democratic Party's candidate for Senate in Connecticut, Ned Lamont of Greenwich, is an heir to a J.P. Morgan fortune who has spent $10 million of his own money trying to purchase a Senate seat. The Democratic Party's candidate for governor in New York, Eliot Spitzer, is accused by his Republican rival of having begun his political career with a $9 million loan from his father.