The lead, front-page news article in today's Times is a perfect example of why I find the newspaper both indispensable and infuriating. It's indispensable, because who else is paying close enough attention, and has enough space, to report that "the lobbying firm run by Norman Brownstein" was mobilized to preserve the "loophole." Mr. Brownstein and his firm have been the topic of extensive coverage over at our sister site FutureOfCapitalism.com, but the Times leaves out all his Democratic connections.
The infuriating part of it is that the entire Times story comes from the perspective that a real estate spinoff somehow ought to be a taxable event, and that the failure to tax it is a "loophole," the preservation of which "and other changes related to real estate trusts meant that the tax deal would be $1.06 billion more expensive to the federal government." The assumption is that a tax increase is money that the government can count on, even before it has been imposed. There's no effort to look at it from the perspective of shareholders, or to say that the tax increase to make a previously tax-free transaction taxable would hurt the market value of investments owned by individuals.
There's a lot of good raw information in the Times, it's just maddening to so often have to read past the political spin and adjust to compensate for it.