Bad Schumer

Chuck Schumer's mostly a good guy, but his willingness to go to bat for the poor, put-upon multi-millionaire hedge fund manager certainly isn't part of that overall goodness. To reiterate, my basic view is that we shouldn't just make hedge fund managers switch from paying capital gains tax to income tax, but should actually just eliminate the differential treatment of capital income and labor income

Here's one proposal along those lines from Ron Wyden and here's a somewhat similar plan from the Center for American Progress. John Edwards' recently released tax plan is along these lines as well in terms of trying to give us more tax fairness. Schumer's bad behavior -- like John Dingell's climate change antics -- is a good reminder of how the political system works, when it comes to defending the interests of powerful, entrenched local groups, Democrats are usually about as bad as Republicans.