New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he's supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street--which he's decided to check out because it's beginning to make some CEOs nervous:

I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?" the CEO asked me. I didn't have an answer. "We're trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this," he continued, clearly concerned. "Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?"

As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don't have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group--at least not yet.

Ah, the protesters aren't brutal--yet.

He goes on:

But the underlying message of Occupy Wall Street--which spread to Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles on Monday--is something the big banks and corporate America may finally have to grapple with before it actually does become dangerous.

What's the message?

At times it can be hard to discern, but, at least to me, the message was clear: The demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.

And that message is a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge--as we've seen in some European countries--if our economy continues to struggle.

To give Sorkin credit, he does seem to have summarized the message of the protest movement accurately. The fact that he does so in the service of telling a CEO whether or not he should be worried about a popular uprising--well, that says a lot about the function of business journalism, doesn't it?

There have been a lot of complaints about New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin being too cozy with the Wall Street powers that he's covering. Some of those critics are in-house; a New York magazine article went so far as to quote a Times staffer who (like several others at the paper) likened Sorkin to disgraced WMD reporter Judith Miller.

Sorkin was on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, part of a roundtable discussion that followed an appearance by Republican Paul Ryan. And that's where Sorkin said this:

SORKIN: I got to tell you, I got an email while the show was going on, while Ryan was just speaking, and even though the Medicare plan may be unpopular, the view by a Wall Street CEO was this guy at least is proposing something.

GREGORY: Yeah.

SORKIN: I think they like the idea of leadership.  They want to get behind that.

Huh--Wall Street CEOs like a plan that gives them tax cuts and makes seniors pay more for healthcare. What other surprises are lurking in his email?

Perhaps someone from the Progressive Caucus should email him about the People's Budget, since he doesn't seem to know about it.

New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote a piece on Sunday (5/15/11) that tried to advance the argument that $250,000 actually isn't that much money to make in a year. The complaint is that politicians who advocate raising tax rates on income above $250,000 have chosen an arbitrary dividing line--above it you're rich, and you'll be taxed accordingly.

Articles like this are annoying for obvious reasons--we're being asked to listen to wealthy people complain that they're not that wealthy, once you factor in the private school tuition and a hefty mortgage. But they often mislead in other areas--especially when it comes to how much wealthy people pay in taxes. Ross Sorkin mentions a Manhattan father of two with a household income of $262,000 who sees his tax bill potentially going up, and he says, "I don't understand why people like us are lumped in with millionaires and billionaires."

As Dean Baker points out, anyone who understands marginal tax rates should know that someone making slightly more than $250,000 would pay a higher rate only on that income above that amount--which, in this case, would amount to a few hundreds dollars at most in extra taxes.

The article goes on to discuss tax policy and budget deficits, and Ross Sorkin makes this point:

much of the income of the country's wealthiest people comes from investments, which is taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of just 15 percent.

So far, neither Democrats nor Republicans dare talk about raising the long-term capital gains tax out of fear that it would reduce crucial investments that could produce jobs.

No one talks about raising capital gains tax rates? The Congressional Progressive Caucus's blueprint, the People's Budget, offers an array of options for raising revenues, including this:

Tax capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income: This policy would eliminate the preferentially low rates on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends (currently 15 percent) and again tax all capital income as ordinary income under the marginal tax rate structure. The tax rate on long-term capital gains is scheduled to rise to 20 percent in 2013 and dividends are scheduled to be taxed again as ordinary income.

So someone's talking about it after all.

Part of Ross Sorkin's point is that more tax brackets would help clarify the difference between earning a mere $250,000 or, say, many millions of dollars. A fine idea--and also part of the People's Budget. If reporters gave it more attention, they might discover that the answers are staring them in the face.