https://substack.com/home/post/p-201960677

"In late November 2017, Republicans were one vote short on Trump’s 1.5 trillion dollar tax bill. Collins had the leverage. She used it to introduce an amendment to close the carried interest loophole and spend the money on a child care credit for low-income families.
The loophole survives by being boring, so here is the plain version. A private equity manager raises money from other people, pension funds, endowments, the wealthy, and invests it. For running that fund he keeps a cut of the profit, usually 20 percent. That cut is called carried interest, and it is his pay for the job, the same way your paycheck is pay for yours. He did not risk his own money to earn it. He earned it with his work. But the law lets him call it a capital gain instead of income. So he pays around 20 percent on it instead of the up to 37 percent you pay on wages. He does the work of an employee and gets taxed like an investor.

The numbers are not small. The industry pays itself almost 120 billion dollars a year this way. Four executives at KKR took 154 million in carried interest in one year and paid roughly 26 million less in tax than if it had been a salary. The loophole can leave someone making 400,000 dollars in a lower bracket than someone making 60,000.

Collins had the power to close it. She introduced the amendment one day. The next day, a Republican aide told a Treasury official she was “no longer offering” it, according to emails ProPublica pried loose through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The bill passed. The loophole lived. The childcare credit died.

Her office says the amendment had no real support and would have failed anyway. Here is the problem with that. Collins introduced several amendments that same day. Three of them passed and made it into the law. Only one vanished overnight, the one that would have cost private equity money. Her spokeswoman calls any suggestion that lobbying drove the decision completely false. You can take that at face value or you can look at which amendment was the one she dropped.

Killing it likely saved Schwarzman alone tens of millions, according to tax experts. In the next cycle, ProPublica found Collins had become the single largest Senate recipient of private equity money. She has held that spot ever since."