Holman Jenkins, Jr.’s Wall Street Journal ($) Business World column today is a nice tribute to the late President Reagan’s legacy toward the business community. Here is a tidbit:

The late president came into his political maturity as a traveling spokesman for General Electric, a company that each age seems to rediscover as an icon of American industry. Mr. Reagan traversed the land and heard GE executives complain about taxes and regulation, and, lo, somehow he understood that this was a bad thing, which was an achievement for his time.
Mr. Reagan’s GE years are shrouded in mystery, or at least shrouded in the discarded newspaper morgues of a hundred defunct small-town newspapers in places he visited and spoke on GE’s behalf. He received a treatment not unlike the rigorous apprenticeship afflicted on future CEOs of GE, shipped from place to place, meeting the company’s far-flung employees, seeing its various businesses up close. His GE minder, Ed Langley, was fond of saying that Mr. Reagan was “marinated in the middle class” in a way no politician could match, an experience that would have “turned Jane Fonda into Margaret Thatcher.”
Mr. Reagan drew a novel lesson from this experience: that corporations were full of hardworking, inventive people creating things of practical use to their fellow Americans. He failed to notice the befouling of any wetlands or the extinction of any owls. To many critics who even now are starting to pipe up, Mr. Reagan was an enemy of the poor — because to be supportive of business was, ipso facto, to be an enemy of the poor. He would have understood; he was once a business basher himself. In 1948, Mr. Reagan stumped right along with Harry Truman, giving speeches that blamed the excessive profits of greedy businessmen for inflation.
Here resides the single most overlooked achievement of Mr. Reagan’s legacy, what Bear Stearns economist David Malpass calls his “reminding us that the private sector is OK.”

Read the whole piece.

A KPMG tax shelter that the Internal Revenue Service last year declared abusive snared a group of prominent American companies, reflecting the popularity of efforts to reduce corporate taxes has become. Here are earlier posts on KPMG’s mounting problems relating to promotion of such tax shelters. The highly aggressive shelter that KPMG promoted was called the “contested liability acceleration strategy,” or CLAS, and it has been estimated that the promotion of the shelter generated $20 million in fees for the firm..
This Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that the IRS contends tht the KPMG promoted shelter generated at least $1.7 billion in tax savings for more than 25 companies. Delta Air Lines, Whirlpool Corp., Clear Channel Communications Inc., WorldCom Inc., Tenet Healthcare Corp. and the U.S. units of AstraZeneca PLC and Fresenius Medical Care AG all bought the shelter. Apparently, several other prominent companies signed agreements to buy the shelter, but it was unclear whether those companies actually implemented it.
A federal grand jury in Manhattan is currently investigating KPMG‘s past tax-shelter activities. At this point, it’s not known what penalties the IRS will seek from KPMG in connection with CLAS or other past shelter sales.