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Article snippet: After the billionaire investor Warren Buffett exposed the unfairness of a federal tax code that assessed his secretary at a higher rate than him, it was hard to imagine a tax reform plan that would be even less fair. House Republicans have come up with one. That’s not because the plan indiscriminately favors the rich. It’s because to a degree unprecedented in American tax history, it favors the investor class, Mr. Buffett prominent among them, at the expense of people who work for a living, like his secretary. It favors Donald Trump and his fellow real estate developers and investors, who already benefit from numerous loopholes in the tax code. “I wouldn’t call this tax reform,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. There is no more glaring example of the House Republicans’ indifference to the inequities embedded in the tax code than the treatment of so-called carried interest. For decades, the carried interest provision has enabled wealthy private equity managers, hedge fund managers and real estate investors to pay the lower capital gains rate (20 percent, not counting the Obama health care surcharge of 3.8 percent) on their income rather than the rate on ordinary income (a maximum of 39.6 percent). The former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was excoriated for taking advantage of the loophole in 2012, and as a candidate Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to close it. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this count... Link to the full article to read more