Bad Journalism Dept.

A story on today's McClatchy wire about retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist accuses him of local pork-barrel politics by pointing to the $3 million tax measure he helped get through Congress to remedy an inequity in the tax code that affected songwriters. Doesn't seem a fair example to me at all. Songwriters who sold their song catalog were taxed twice, once as ordinary income and again under self-employment tax, about 40% instead of the capital gain rate of 15% that a publisher would pay if they sold the same catalog as a business asset. The Nashville Songwriters Association International regarded the passage as its biggest victory this year, and the measure of course helps songwriters nationally and not just in Tennessee. I think Bill Frist is a putz who deserves the scorn of Republicans and Democrats alike for his poor performance in the Senate. But it's hard to argue that fixing bad tax policy for songwriters everywhere should be flagged as pork barrel spending.