Murdoch's Challenge

Here's one challenge Rupert Murdoch will face when he takes over the Wall Street Journal that you haven't yet read about: squaring that paper's position on a tax increase for money managers with that of another New York-based paper owned by Mr. Murdoch's News Corp., the New York Post. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial yesterday reiterating its position against the tax increase. Wrote the Journal, "There is in fact a good case for treating hedge funds and private equity as publicly traded partnerships on most of their income. That's because the corporations owned by these partnerships already pay the corporate income tax when the profits are earned, and before the dollars are passed on as dividends to the private equity owners. To tax this income again as corporate income by the partnerships, and then a third time as a capital gain to investors in the equity fund, constitutes multiple taxation of the same income. How this helps U.S. financial competitiveness is a mystery."

That position puts the Journal at odds with the New York Post, which earlier this month published an editorial headlined "The Fat Cats' Friend," criticizing Senator Schumer for defending New York's money managers. The Post sided with Senator Clinton and Rep. Charles Rangel, who want to raise the taxes. The Rangel bill that the Post supports amounts to a giant tax increase not only on private equity and hedge fund managers but also on real estate partnerships. With the editorial, the Post joined another New York-based newspaper, the New York Times, in backing the tax increase.

With Mr. Schumer reportedly readying a bill to raise taxes on all partnerships, readers haven't seen the last of this issue by a long shot. There will be a chance for Mortimer Zuckerman's Daily News to weigh in. Our own position is for this principle: that all like interests should be taxed alike, and at a rate designed to maximize the incentive to take risk. Also, since New Yorkers tend to have higher incomes and higher capital gains, lower levels of federal taxation help New York — a point sadly lost on most of our congressional delegation.

If the recent stock-market turmoil underscores anything, it is that the risks taken by the money managers being targeted by Congress are real. Deriding them as "fat cats" only leads to the sort of policies that punish success and that make the wallets of all New Yorkers thinner while fattening up the real fat cats — the politicians in Washington collecting tax money and spending it on pork-barrel projects.