"Pension-Fund Looters Get Tax Breaks, Too"

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Pension-Fund Looters Get Tax Breaks, Too

By Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/pension-fund-looters-get-tax-breaks-too-20131004

"SNIP...............................


More recently, I've written many times about the failure of Democratic Party politicians like Barack Obama to do anything about the outrageous carried interest tax break, under which hedge fund billionaires like the ones manning the board of the Manhattan Institute and making millions managing the pensions of states like Rhode Island pay a maximum personal tax rate of 15 percent.

In fact, not only have Democrats not done anything about that outrage, there have been many prominent ones – like for instance Cory Booker and Bill Clinton, two politicians who both benefitted from finance-sector largesse in their respective careers – who stood up and defiantly took bullets for the industry when Obama offered highly muted criticisms of Mitt Romney's finance-sector past last summer.

In a way, I should probably thank Henn, because had he not written his piece, I wouldn't have remembered this key point. Not only are states like Rhode Island paying millions in fees to outrageously expensive money managers, but those millions will be taxed at a rate far below what the teachers and police and sanitation workers who are being forced to swallow cuts in those states pay on their dwindling incomes. This is thanks in large part to a tax loophole preserved for years by cowardly Wall Street-supplicating politicians hailing, as Henn correctly notes, from both parties, Republican and Democrat.

There's another section of Henn's piece that coincides with another industry-friendly online criticism of the Rolling Stone piece, an article written by Andrew Biggs for the American Enterprise Institute. I've actually also seen the following argument in a few letters sent to me from pro-industry types in just the last few days, so it feels like a collectively-agreed-upon talking point of very recent vintage. And it's really, really weird stuff.


...............................SNIP"

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1. So the pensioned government retirees pay a higher tax rate

than the hedge fund guys do? Is that right?