Win-win for the Wydens


The New York Times ran a story the other day about a supposed intra-family rift between Senator Ron "Gatsby" Wyden and his rich hedge fund manager son, Adam. The son posted some stuff on Twitter criticizing his dad's proposals to tax the über-rich, and the Times noticed.

I'm not buying it. The story's a little too neat and tidy. It bolsters Gatsby's self-proclaimed credentials as a fighter for the little guy, and of course, the son's clients are probably eating it up. 

Besides, many of Daddy's pet proposals are going nowhere, despite the fact that he is the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. The "billionaire tax" he touted a while back, and which the Times dutifully mentions, was dead about five minutes after he announced it. And as for ending favorable capital gains treatment for private equity managers like Wyden the Younger, that's been on the table for many years, and so far, the Congressional response has been a soggy band-aid.

I'll buy the old man's tax-the-rich cred when he actually gets something done. He's got about 10 days left before we're in a Congressional election year, and nothing serious ever gets accomplished on taxes in an election year. A year from now, Gatbsy will probably be bounced from his committee chair, just in time to run for re-election at age 73.

And of course, the Times makes no mention of the fact that the current Mrs. Daddy is playing individual stocks like nobody's business these days, especially Nvidia, a gaming/crypto chip outfit that currently has got a big beef going with federal regulators. By my amateur calculations, she's holding somewhere between $1.2 million and $2.9 million in Nvidia. That's the real family money story, I think. 

But you won't read about it anywhere but here. For some reason, the mainstream media think Gatsby is kinda cute, and they buy whatever p.r. he pumps out. It's like Mark Hatfield, without the substance.

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