An editorial in today's Times says:
If Mr. Boehner really wants to crack down on cheating, he might look to the carried-interest tax loophole, which allows hedge fund managers to mischaracterize their income as capital gains and costs the Treasury $11 billion a year — far more than extra dollars for food stamps.
The Times source for the "$11 billion a year" number is a Times op-ed that, when it appeared, Smartertimes pointed out was inaccurate, but the Times did not correct. As I wrote when the op-ed appeared:
A recent Huffington Post article cited Treasury Department estimates on the tax change at $1.3 billion in in 2013, and "about $13.5 billion over the next decade." The news columns of the Times itself reported last month that "Changes to the treatment of carried interest could bring in $17 billion over 10 years, according to Congressional estimates." It looks like Ms. Forester de Rothschild is mixing up ten year estimates with annual estimates. In other words, she's off by a factor of about ten.
Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-wing group, puts the ten-year revenue impact of changing treatment of carried interest at $21 billion. The Times news columns in October of 2013 said the change "would raise an estimated $16 billion extra over a decade."
Why the Times editorialists are sticking with the "$11 billion a year" figure in the face of a pile of evidence from their own paper and elsewhere that the number is wrong is a mystery. A cynic might suggest they are trying to inflate it into a bigger issue than it really is.
The sentence from today's Times editorial is also misleading because it suggests the tax treatment applies only to "hedge fund managers" when in fact it applies also to venture capital, private equity, real estate, oil and gas — any investment partnership with long-term capital gains.