The "today's paper" page of the Times Web site and the "today's headlines" email from the New York Times both summarize the paper's lead news article of the day as follows: "There are concerns about whether the forces that have driven the market rally — government spending and banner corporate profits — will be sufficient to push it higher."

Got that? "Government spending" is what drove the stock market higher. The Times news article, however, reports nothing of the sort, attributing the rally in part to actions by the Federal Reserve. The words "government spending" do not appear in the news article. There are some problems, of course, with "government spending" as an explanation for the increase in the stock market. For one, the rally has continued notwithstanding the election of a Republican House of Representatives that professes a commitment to spending restraint and the implementation of the "sequester" restraints in the growth of government spending.

And of course the Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman, wrote just the other day about what he called "an unprecedented run of declines in public employment and government purchases that have crippled our economy's recovery." Got that? The Times wants readers to believe that rising government spending is feeding a stock market rally at the same time that declining government spending is crippling the economy's recovery.

The error is illuminating about the ideology of the editor who writes these summaries. A conservative wouldn't necessarily agree that government spending is good for the stock market, reasoning that the money the government spends has to come from somewhere eventually, and that somewhere is likely to be the private sector, which can probably spend the money or invest it more efficiently than the government can.

A Times article on Yahoo's decision to require employees to work from the office rather than telecommuting from home includes the sentence, "On Monday, another ailing company, Best Buy, announced that it, too, would no longer permit employees to work remotely, reversing one of the most permissive flexible workplace policies in the business world."

Is it accurate to describe Best Buy as "ailing" or fair to do so without including (or, apparently, even seeking) comment from Best Buy responding to that characterization?

I own some Best Buy stock. It closed yesterday at $18.40 a share. Including dividends, it's up 55% from where it closed on December 31, 2012, far outpacing the stock market overall. (Update: It was up another 4% this morning, so I sold my shares, figuring I'd take the money and reallocate the investment into some other "ailing" company on its way to recovery.) According to Yahoo! Finance, Best Buy had $49.62 billion in revenue over the past year, and $2.36 billion in EBITDA. Granted, it's not growing at the pace it used to be growing, and it hasn't been profitable. But if it's fair or accurate for the Times business page to describe a company whose stock is up 55% year to date as "ailing," either the word "ailing" is meaningless, or the Times' standards of accuracy are.

The Times allowed two op-ed pieces over three days calling for an end to the capital gains tax treatment of carried interest earned by managers of investment partnerships. Yet when someone wants to defend the current tax treatment, the article isn't allowed into the physical newspaper at all, but shunted into the online "Dealbook" area. From the article, by Steve Judge, the president and chief executive of the Private Equity Growth Capital Council:

The aristocratic argument presented by Ms. de Rothschild and others that capital gains treatment should only be available to those with money to invest would advance a policy that puts a higher value on financial contributions than vision, hard work and other forms of "sweat equity."

The underlying principle is no different than two friends who partner together to purchase a restaurant. One might bring capital and the other brings expertise. The restaurant could be in disrepair or a great concept that needs additional capital to expand. The chef identifies the restaurant to buy and possesses the skills to manage the restaurant and add value to the enterprise over time. The friend has the capital to invest, but doesn't possess the operational or investment skills to generate a return.

When they sell the restaurant years later, both partners receive capital gains treatment on their long-term investment. A private equity partnership works in the same way. This is Partnership Law 101.

… The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan committee of Congress, has pegged the additional revenue from carried interest at just $16.85 billion over 10 years. The joint committee estimate even includes the controversial enterprise value provision, which experts believe constitutes two-thirds of the total revenue assumption.

We had pointed out here at Smartertimes that one of the Times op-eds got the revenue estimate wrong, mistakenly confusing single-year numbers with ten-year numbers. Yet the Times has yet to correct the mistake.

The usually liberal Times columnist Joe Nocera has a column highly critical of NASA's chief climate scientist James Hansen:

what people hear from Hansen today is not so much his science but his broad, unscientific views on, say, the evils of oil companies… There is, in fact, enormous resentment toward Hansen inside NASA, where many officials feel that their solid, analytical work on climate science is being lost in what many of them describe as "the Hansen sideshow." His activism is not really doing any favors for the science his own subordinates are producing.

It shows all the signs of being a surprising attack by the Times against left-wing orthodoxy. Yet the end of the column shows that Mr. Nocera and Mr. Hansen in the end don't really have a disagreement over principle or goals, but over tactics:

What is particularly depressing is that Hansen has some genuinely important ideas, starting with placing a graduated carbon tax on fossil fuels. Such a tax would undoubtedly do far more to reduce carbon emissions and save the planet than stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.

A carbon tax might be worth getting arrested over. But by allowing himself to be distracted by Keystone, Hansen is hurting the very cause he claims to care so much about.

At the Times even the pro-Keystone pipeline columnists favor a carbon tax! In other words, dissent is possible, but within limits.

The money manager Steven Rattner has an op-ed in the Times opposing a provision in recently enacted legislation that allows private equity and hedge funds to advertise. He writes:

For the first time, private equity and hedge funds will be able to advertise — and thereby separate inexpert individuals from their savings. Putting money in these alternatives is yet another type of investing that Americans shouldn't try at home. Until now, only a small percentage of Americans who qualified to invest this way (the law requires they have an income of $200,000 per year for an individual or a net worth of $1 million) did so. The possibility that advertising will lure more people to participate does no one any favors. Besides, these days, the most successful private equity and hedge funds can already raise all the capital they can efficiently manage without advertising.

So I'll wager that most of this new advertising will come from firms that sophisticated institutional investors wouldn't consider investing in. No wonder that the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose former chairwoman Mary Schapiro opposed the legislation, has been taking its time writing the regulations to implement these provisions.

Maybe if Mr. Rattner had been legally allowed to advertise his money management skills, he wouldn't have been reduced to raising money for his own firm by hiring campaign consultants (like Hank Morris) who were cozy with the state and local government officials (like Alan Hevesi) who controlled pension funds for government employees, or to offering favors like helping the brother of a New York state pension official get a DVD distribution deal for the movie "Chooch." The pension funds are the "sophisticated institutional investors" that Mr. Rattner is talking about. I've been a defender of Mr. Rattner from overly jealous prosecution on these matters, but the lack of self-awareness or reflection on his own case that Mr. Rattner displays here is a bit much even for me.

The other problem with Mr. Rattner's whole approach here is that it proceeds on a utilitarian basis (how best to protect those dim-witted chump investors), rather than a right-based approach (individuals have the right to free speech, so the individual hedge fund or private equity managers have a right to commercial speech to promote their business, so long as the speech is not fraudulent). If Mr. Rattner thinks it is acceptable on a moral and constitutional basis to ban advertising whenever the advertised product might be bad or risky for the consumer, why stop at hedge funds and private equity funds? Why not go further and ban all alcohol, casino and state lottery advertising, along with ads for foods and drinks that have added sugar, ads for motorcycles, and ads featuring fashion models that might set a poor example by being too tan or too thin? Imagine the ridicule and uproar that would arise if some conservative were to suggest the government ban on advertising by the New York Times on the grounds that the ads pose the risk of luring in readers who aren't sophisticated enough to see past the left-wing world view advanced in the Times' pages.

This site is usually devoted to criticizing the New York Times, not praising it. But this weekend the newspaper has published two pieces that deserve praise, not criticism. One is an astonishing column by Christina Romer, the economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was chairwoman of President Obama's council of economic advisers. She comes out publicly against Mr. Obama's State of the Union proposal to increase the minimum wage. The second is what seems like a deservedly scathing book review by Laura Secor of a book by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett that sides with the government of Iran.

If you are a conservative who has stopped reading the Times out of disgust for the left wing bias, click through the links above to those two articles. One can make disparaging comments — "even a stopped clock is right twice a day," "the regular editors must have been on vacation," "how did that get through" — but that would be ungenerous. Rather, just savor these gems.

Paul Krugman's column today offers the Nobel laureate economist's explanation for the slow economic recovery: "Right now Washington is focused on the idiocy of the sequester, but this is only the latest episode in an unprecedented run of declines in public employment and government purchases that have crippled our economy's recovery."

Here is the unprecedented decline in public employment to which Professor Krugman refers, according to the seasonally adjusted data from the Labor Department's Current Employment Statistics survey:

Year	Number of Government (federal, state, and local) employees in December
2004	21,693,000
2005	21,879,000
2006	22,088,000
2007	22,376,000
2008	22,556,000
2009	22,480,000
2010	22,267,000
2011	21,950,000
2012	21,873,000 (preliminary)

After what Professor Krugman calls the "unprecedented run of declines in public employment," there were still 180,000 more government employees in December of 2012 than there were in December of 2004. On a percentage basis, the decline from 22.6 million government employees at the 2008 peak to 21.9 million government employees at the 2012 low (3 percent!) seems hardly large enough to be as crippling as Professor Krugman claims it has been. On a percentage basis, it's not unprecedented, either; government employment fell to 15.9 million in July 1982 from 16.6 million in April 1980, a steeper decline (four percent) over a shorter time span. Professor Krugman's claim that the decline in public employment is unprecedented is inaccurate.

Professor Krugman calls policies he disagrees with "idiocy," but here at Smarterimes we have a more civil and modulated tone, so we won't characterize the professor's column other than to say that it's inaccurate and we disagree with it.

When it comes to behavior between consenting adults I tend to be pretty libertarian, but the 2,000-word Times feature with the Web headline "Bondage, Domination, and Kink Sex Communities Step Into View" was a bit much even for me.

The Times seems to view waterboarding of Islamist terrorists by the American government for the purpose of preventing future terrorist attacks to be criminal, but views waterboarding for the purpose of sexual gratification as worthy of celebration.

I'm not kidding about waterboarding; other practices discussed in the article include "electricity, knives," "ABDL (adult baby, diaper lover)" and "fire play, which involved accelerant placed on strategic points of the woman's body and set ablaze in short, dramatic bursts."

Again, the Times views eating a spoonful of sugar or smoking a cigarette as a dangerous activity on which the government should clamp down, but setting a person afire for sexual gratification is portrayed as the next frontier in the struggle for civil rights. Of 12 persons quoted in the article, 11 are either participants or advocates of these practices, and the 12th works in a store catering to them. There's not a single person quoted in the article who suggests maybe that this stuff is dangerous, or that the analogy the Times writer and the participants draw between civil rights for gays and lesbians and "coming out" for people who do this stuff is not a perfect one.

George P. Shultz served America honorably and with distinction in a number of high posts, but for some reason, the New York Times can't be bothered to spell his name correctly, despite repeated posts here pointing out the mistake. Smartertimes wrote about this error on September 30, 2000; on December 17, 2000; and on June 14, 2001. Today the offender is Jeremy W. Peters, who graduated from the University of Michigan in 2002 and so is probably too young to have an active memory of the days when Mr. Shultz was a regular figure in front-page news articles. Mr. Peters' article is about the confirmation vote on Jacob Lew to be Treasury secretary, and it is flawed not only because of the misspelling of Mr. Shultz's name, but because while it reports that the final vote was 71 to 26, there is no hyperlink to the roll call vote.

Back in the old days the Times used to print the roll calls on votes such as this in agate type appended to the articles, or alongside. Nowadays, with more important uses for newsprint and ink such as 2,000-word feature articles on "bondage, domination, and kink sex communities" and 950-word articles, complete with full-body photographs, on nude beaches in the New York area (this in February!), there's no room in the paper for such extraneous information as the names of the 26 senators who voted against Mr. Lew. So the more accepted practice is to include a hyperlink to a roll call vote somewhere as an assistance to Times readers who might be interested in that news. Here it is, for Smartertimes readers who might be interested.

The Times op-ed page today carries its second article in three days on the tax treatment of "carried interest" earned by managers of investment partnerships. This one is by Sheila Bair, the former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She writes:

Republicans should put fundamental tax reform on the table and make it our priority to end preferential treatment of investment income, which lets managers of hedge funds pay half the tax rate of managers of shoe stores.

Defenders of this giveaway make the unsubstantiated claim that it encourages job-creating investments. But what we have now is merely an immense pool of investment funds that has created far too few jobs. A report last year by Bain and Co. projected that by 2020 there will be $900 trillion in financial assets around the globe, chasing investments in a real economy worth only $90 trillion in gross domestic product. Why in heaven's name do we need to keep a tax preference to encourage more?

This claim that managers of hedge funds pay half the tax rate of managers of shoe stores is bogus.

First of all, it's not a "giveaway" to let a person keep money that they earned. It's their money, not the government's.

Second, the tax treatment applies to long-term capital gains, whether they are the gains of someone who starts a shoe store business or someone who starts a hedge fund. If a shoe store manager starts Zappos and has founder's stock that is sold after more than a year, he pays the long-term capital gains rate. If a hedge fund manager starts a hedge fund and makes investments in stock or real estate or oil and gas ventures that are held for more than a year, he pays the long-term capital gains rate. If it's a short-term investment, it's taxed at a higher rate. If the fund loses money, the hedge fund manager may not earn any carried interest to be taxed on at all. And the management-fee part of the investment manager's fee (the part that depends on assets under management, not the return) is taxed at the higher rate. For some reason, there's a lot of confusion about this issue. I understand that plenty of bank CEOs whose income is taxed at the higher ordinary income rates don't like the carried interest capital gains treatment of their competitors and want to end it. But they should be able to make that argument without distorting what the current policy is.

Third, this distinction between "financial assets" and the "real economy" is an artificial one. Ms. Bair may be right that investment funds have created "far too few jobs," but it's not clear how raising taxes on them would create more. In fact the venture capital, private equity, hedge fund, real estate, and oil and gas industries have created and preserved an awful lot of jobs.

Ms. Bair goes on, "Republicans should also put rebuilding the nation's transportation and energy infrastructure high on our political agenda. From Lincoln's transcontinental railroad to Eisenhower's highway system, Republicans have understood that investing in critical infrastructure projects creates jobs and expands commerce."

This is also bogus.

First of all, we had an $800 billion Obama stimulus bill, not to mention a series of pork-filled energy and transportation bills under the George W. Bush administration. It got us Solyndra and various other solar or battery companies that either went bankrupt or were sold to China, along with lots of traffic jams caused by road construction by unionized workers alongside signs proclaiming that some project was paid for by the Recovery Act. No matter how much money the taxpayers pile onto these projects, the bridges always seem to be in terrible shape (or so the construction contractors and unions tell us, in an effort to win more spending).

Second, this contradicts the earlier argument about how there are too many financial assets chasing too few real world projects. Why is venture capital investment in transportation or energy bad, but government investment in it good?

Third, it misreads history. Lincoln's transcontinental railroad empowered a private company — Union Pacific Railroad Company — to transport, in the words of the act, "troops, and munitions of war." It was a wartime measure that had little or nothing to do with jobs or commerce. Likewise, the Eisenhower highway system was a Cold War measure, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, an expenditure explained in the words of that act not in terms of jobs but "because of its primary importance to the national defense."

There's plenty of other ridiculous material in the op-ed, but it's not worth going into.

The Times editorial "Why Taxes Have to Go Up" gets a response in my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), or Newsmax (here).

A Times editorial urging the Senate to confirm Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense says, "Mr. Hagel is one of a fading breed of moderate Republicans whose independence and past willingness to challenge Republican orthodoxy on Iraq, sanctions on Iran and other issues is admirable."

Mr. Hagel's opposition to sanctions on Iran wasn't a challenge to "Republican orthodoxy"; the sanctions he opposed were passed by votes such as 98 to 2, with the two dissenters being Mr. Hagel and another Republican, Richard Lugar. They were signed into law by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Sanctions against Iran aren't "Republican orthodoxy," they are supported at this point by Democrats, the United Nations, European nations, and even the New York Times editorial page as a preferred peaceful alternative to military attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. A Times editorial in June of 2012, for example, referred to "the current international consensus for sanctions." It's yet another example of the Hagel double standard in action. When President Obama is for sanctions on Iran, they are an "international consensus." When Senator Hagel opposes them, they are "Republican orthodoxy."

Note also the reference to Mr. Hagel's "past willingness." In order to win support for his confirmation. Mr. Hagel has abandoned his willingness to challenge the bipartisan orthodoxy on Iran sanctions, suggesting that the "independence" the Times is so enamored of is subordinate to his desire for the Pentagon job.

Today's Times includes an op-ed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild about the taxation of carried interest that includes several factual errors that seem worthy of correction. She writes:

The difference in revenue to the United States government when this combined income is taxed at 20 percent rather than at 39.6 percent is about $11 billion annually. Indeed, the Real Estate Roundtable, a leading industry lobbying group, puts the estimate even higher, at $13 billion — $5 billion in real estate alone.

These revenue estimates for increasing taxes on carried interest seem way off base. 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.

Second, she writes, "While the tax legislation passed on Jan. 1 increased the top individual-income tax rate to 39.6 percent from 35 percent for couples making more than $450,000 and individuals making more than $400,000, it left carried-interest income taxed at just 20 percent." That "twenty percent" understates the capital gains rate for many earners of carried interest subject to the new top individual income tax rate. In fact, once you add in the 3.8% ObamaCare tax and state and local taxes, capital gains rates reportedly reach as high as 33% in California and 31.4% in New York.

There are all kinds of other conceptual errors in the article, starting with the basic assumption that it's somehow a "government handout" to allow people to keep money that they earned. But these two are just basic factual errors that deserve correction if one believes that a person is entitled to her own opinion, but not to her own facts.

Jim Rutenberg, a Times reporter whose work about the Hagel nomination has been criticized here for dwelling on the anonymous funding of Hagel opponents without mentioning the anonymous funding of groups paying Senator Hagel, or other groups that are not conservative, bends over backward today in a front-page profile of Hagel opponent Michael Goldfarb to appear evenhanded. He mentions "the Emergency Committee for Israel, an anonymously financed group that advertises against President Obama and Congressional Democrats as insufficiently supportive of Israel." But he also mentions "the anonymously financed liberal blog ThinkProgress that frequently attacks the Kochs."

It appears as though Mr. Rutenberg is being fair, mentioning the anonymously funded nature of both liberal and conservative groups. But the article also mentions two other anonymously financed liberal publications, the Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, without mentioning the anonymously financed nature of either one of them. So even when it's trying to appear fair, the Times can't seem to avoid the reflex to describe conservative groups as "anonymously financed," while omitting that description in the case of other left-leaning groups and publications. The inconsistency is grating; the Times should either describe all such groups as anonymously funded or none of them, rather than applying the description at the whim of the reporter and leaving readers to speculate about the motivation for including the description in some cases and omitting it in others.

The comments section of yesterday's post here on 25 potential buyers of the Boston Globe mentioned a 26^th possible buyer: Michael Bloomberg and his Bloomberg, L.P.

Some reasons why that would make sense: He's a native of the Boston area. The Bloomberg wire reportedly broke the news of sale, which might indicate that Bloomberg was approached as a potential buyer before the New York Times Company, the Globe's current owner, announced it publicly. The Times Company hired Evercore to advise on the sale, and Evercore is the same firm that McGraw Hill used to sell Businessweek to Bloomberg. Finally, suppose that at least some members of the Times extended family want to diversify their assets into more lucrative investments by eventually selling not just the Globe but the Times itself. Mr. Bloomberg is one of the few buyers out there who is both deep-pocketed and ideologically acceptable. Seeing how Bloomberg does with the Globe would be a kind of trial run; if he doesn't embarrass himself, a sale of the Times could come three years down the road.

Some reasons why that would not make sense: Mr. Bloomberg's ties to the Boston area are weaker since the death in 2011 of his mother, who lived in Medford. If Mr. Bloomberg were approached by Evercore and were actually interested, he would just buy the thing rather than going public with a news article and potentially alerting other interested buyers. Bloomberg is a financial news and information company, not a general interest one, and if it is going to buy a newspaper, the Financial Times would be a better fit. Finally, while Mr. Bloomberg might be interested in someday buying the New York Times, he has a big enough ego that he'd find the idea of a Boston Globe test to be insulting, beneath him.