The House health care bill announced today by Speaker Pelosi would impose "a tax equal to 5.4 percent of so much of the modified adjusted gross income of the taxpayer as exceeds $1,000,000." For non-joint filers, that tax would be imposed at the $500,000 level. The tax is on page 337 of the 1990-page bill, in a section headed "surcharge on high-income individuals." It would take effect beginning in 2011. And it claims, miraculously, that the newly changed tax rate "shall not be treated as a change in a rate of tax for purposes of section 15 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986." The top tax rate is already scheduled to increase to 39.6% from 35%, so the 5.4% tax would come on top of that, as well as on top of city and state income tax rates that already clear or approach 10% in some places.

From the FT: "Swedish Model Provides Hope."

Remember that 50% British tax rate on "the rich" that the British Conservative Party and New York Times columnist David Brooks think is such a fine idea? The Wall Street Journal reports in passing in the midst of an article about a hedge fund manager who had been based in Britain and who recently bought a $120 million yacht: "She recently moved her fund to Cyprus, according to press reports, to avoid Britain's new tax increase and rules for nondomiciled residents." Capital is portable, a fact that Speaker Pelosi may want to keep in mind as she pushes to finance a health care overhaul with an income tax surcharge on millionaires.

The government has overstated the number of jobs saved or created by federal stimulus spending, the Associated Press reports.

How good is the word of Goldman Sachs' CFO these days? Here's Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil:

Goldman, for one, has long said it wouldn't have incurred any material losses even if AIG had gone under.

"We limited our overall credit exposure to AIG through a combination of collateral and market hedges," Goldman's chief financial officer, David Viniar, said in March. "There would have been no credit losses if AIG had failed."

Then again, Viniar is the same guy who this month made the ridiculous claim that Goldman doesn't have a too-big-to-fail guarantee from the government. Goldman has refused to identify who the counterparties were on the other side of its hedges, rendering Viniar's statement in March unverifiable.

President Obama is more popular outside America than inside America, at least among those who have Bloomberg terminals, a new Bloomberg survey finds. Outside America, Mr. Obama's favorable rating is 57%, according to the poll; while "among U.S. investors, two-thirds hold an unfavorable opinion of Obama."

The New York Times has an article about how a former aide to Eliot Spitzer, Eric Dinallo, is attracting backing from Spitzer foes like Kenneth Langone and Richard Grasso for Mr. Dinallo's campaign for attorney general of New York State. The article says:

Congress needs to undo the damage from two pieces of legislation: the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and allowed for mergers of traditional banks with investment banks, and the Commodity Future Modernization Act in 2000, which deregulated the derivatives market. "They were profound, once-in-a-century missteps" that "destroyed our economy," Mr. Dinallo said.

Interestingly enough, given that Mr. Dinallo is a Democrat, both laws were signed into law by President Clinton at a time when the Treasury secretary was Lawrence Summers, who is now a top economic aide to President Obama.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about "the world's largest wind farm" in Roscoe, Texas, which manages somehow to omit the fact that the facility was built with $121,903,306 in U.S. taxpayer subsidies. The project, the Journal says, employs about 10 staffers and 60 contractors. One way to look at it is that it's about $1.7 million in taxpayer subsidies for each of those 70 jobs. For more on wind energy subsidies please see the earlier posts on the topic here and here.

The cuts in executive pay imposed by the Obama administration are "political payback to silence critics of its financial reform proposals," a professor at Columbia Business School, Charles Calomiris, writes in today's Financial Times.

Agree or disagree with Mr. Calomiris's claim about the pay tsar, it is possible to discern a broader trend of the Obama administration trying to silence or discredit its critics, from the attacks on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News to the attempt to prevent Humana from communicating with its customers about the health care overhaul (an administration attempt that even a New York Times editorial called "ham-handed" and "a sorry attempt to stifle debate") to the Obama administration trotting out top aides on Sunday talk shows to warn bank lobbyists to stop blocking financial industry "reform."

The New York Times this morning publishes an op-ed piece by Peter W. Galbraith about the need for elections in Afghanistan to be "transparent." But as the Financial Times, National Review, and the American Enterprise Institute blog have pointed out, Mr. Galbraith was less than completely transparent in disclosing his stake in a Kurdish oil field at a time when he testified before Congress about Iraq. There's been no mention at all in the New York Times about Mr. Galbraith's Iraqi Kurdish oil dealings. The Kurds need all the friends they can get, and being a friend of the Kurds isn't necessarily lucrative. It's nice to see some Democrats who are still in the oil business rather than "alternative energy." Still, the same New York Times that is hyper-sensitive when it comes to, say, Richard Perle's business dealings or Henry Kissinger's seems to be giving Mr. Galbraith a pass, much as it did with Brent Scowcroft. It's reminiscent of the old investigative reporter saying: "There are two kinds of people in the world, sources and targets." For the New York Times, Mr. Galbraith is a source (and an op-ed page contributor), not a target.

One other point that should be made about the $9 million du Pont seaweed subsidy: As the release from the Energy Department points out, the program under which it was funded was created by the "America Competes Act of 2007." In signing it, President Bush spoke of the "bipartisan spirit of cooperation" that it embodied. One of Mr. Bush's energy secretaries, Samuel Bodman, is now a du Pont director. It can't be stressed enough that the issues in Washington aren't so much Mr. Bush or Mr. Obama or Democrat or Republican. Both parties and administrations are complicit and participating.

The Department of Energy yesterday announced $151 million in funding for projects through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the Obama administration's promises of transparency, the identities of the grant recipients are hidden in a pdf document. My two favorities were $2,655,174 to "General Motors Company" for "a shape memory alloy energy recovery device to convert waste heat from car engines into electricity. Could significantly increase fuel efficiency in cars (most energy is lost as heat)" and $9 million to E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company for "Production of bio-butanol, an advanced biofuel, from macroalgae (seaweed). Seaweed is a potentially sustainable and scalable new source of biomass that doesn't require arable land or potable water." Given that the taxpayers have already poured $66 billion into bailing out General Motors and its affiliates, you'd think the company's management would be able to find $2.6 million within those funds to support research into this "memory alloy energy recovery device," if it is as promising as the Department of Energy thinks it is. Likewise with Du Pont. The company spent $3.5 million in the first three quarters of 2009 just on lobbying in Washington, and it throws off $2.5 billion a year in free cash flow. If seaweed research is so promising, couldn't a company like du Pont have found some way to finance it internally, without resorting to a taxpayer handout? The du Pont board of directors is a star-studded group that includes such luminaries as Eleuthere I. du Pont and the senior managing director of Evercore Capital Partners, John T. Dillon. If those guys really thought a $9 million investment in seaweed research was going to have a big payoff, don't you think they would be farsighted enough to fund it somehow without resorting to the public purse? Instead, ordinary taxpayers who are a lot poorer than Mr. du Pont and Mr. Dillon -- and rich taxpayers who are in competing companies or industries -- are having money taken from them in taxes (or, actually, borrowed from the Chinese in a way that imposes obligations on future generations of American taxpayers) and given away to fund du Pont's seaweed research.

Hedge fund manager and philanthropist George Soros will put $50 million into an "Institute of New Economic Thinking," dedicated to fighting what the Financial Times calls "unwavering belief in unchecked free markets, which remains pervasive in universities." The FT quotes Mr. Soros as saying in an interview: "The ideologists in the free markets are still in command and I think they'll be very difficult to remove because they have tenure." It's amazing how different people can look at the same universities and see different things; this morning, the Manhattan Institute publishes a piece asking, "How is the university, specifically the humanities and social sciences, with its rampant anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism, muddle-brained identity politics, hostility to the unvarnished truth and all the rest to be re-conquered and restored to sanity?" The fact that Mr. Soros's board of advisers includes a bunch of academic economists and some prominent journalists suggests that the complaints from the right may be more grounded than are Mr. Soros's, but the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the FT interview, Mr. Soros likened free-market economics to Marxism: "a dogma whose time has passed." It's a system under which Mr. Soros has certainly prospered.

Josh Gerstein, a former colleague of mine, has quite the dispatch up at Politico:

A four-hour stop in New Orleans, on his way to a $3 million fundraiser.

Snubbing the Dalai Lama.

Signing off on a secret deal with drug makers.

Freezing out a TV network.

Doing more fundraisers than the last president. More golf, too.

President Barack Obama has done all of those things — and more.

Oh, and he also had a political aide and a press secretary sit in on a Situation Room meeting about Afghanistan policy. So where's the interest-group outrage and the negative press? Mr. Gerstein quotes a former George W. Bush aide saying of President Obama: "The watchdogs are curled up around his feet, sleeping soundly."

Bloomberg News takes a look at why those AIG counterparties -- who included Goldman Sachs -- weren't forced to take a haircut. No definitive answer, but some tantalizing details suggest that such a haircut was at least up for discussion:

Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar. The content of its deliberations has never been made public.