The End of the Carried Interest Loophole?

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Good news! The carried interest loophole, one of the most egregious gifts to billionaire private equity and hedge fund managers around, might finally be on the chopping block:

Right now, the percentage of a fund’s proceeds that investors pay to the manager — called the “carried interest” — gets taxed as if it’s capital gains (at a 15 percent rate, instead of 35 percent), even though the manager doesn’t have any money at risk. It’s as if we treated movie proceeds given to a film’s lead actor as investment income.

….Congress has a bunch of very popular business tax credits that it would like to extend, but the extensions need to be paid for, so the carried interest break is looking more likely to disappear. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) said this week that there’s “a growing sense of inevitability” about the tax hike occurring, despite heavy lobbying from the financial services industry. Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag agreed yesterday, predicting that “you’re going to see a change in the taxation of carried interest pass the Senate within the next few weeks.”

It would be nice to see the carried interest loophole finally meet its maker. It’s a small victory, but an important one.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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