A Times article about Donald Trump's proposal to tax carried interest as ordinary income reports, "the fiscal impact of taxing carried interest income at ordinary income rates would be small: about $2 billion a year in added revenue within a nearly $4 trillion federal budget."
The Times cites no source for this "$2 billion a year" claim.
A February 2013 Times op-ed estimated the annual revenue increase from such a change at between $11 billion and $13 billion. I challenged that estimate at the time, but the Times declined to correct it.
A 2013 Times news article reported, "Changes to the treatment of carried interest could bring in $17 billion over 10 years, according to Congressional estimates."
So now the Times has provided three different estimates of the revenue consequences of this change, with no guidance to readers about which estimate to believe or why the estimates differ so widely. It's disappointingly bad journalism.
The same Times article about Mr. Trump reports:
"We're the most highly taxed nation in the world," he said, incorrectly, on Fox News last week. "That's why taxes have to come down."
In fact there is a definition by which America is "the most highly taxed nation in the world," which is the "total tax revenue in U.S. dollars" at all levels of government. According to this OECD chart, that amounted to $4,266,409,900,000 in 2013, far more than either Japan or Germany, the next closest. If one looks at tax revenue per capita or as a percent of GDP, one gets different results. But it's not accurate for the Times to state flatly that Mr. Trump is incorrect about this.