No change to tax rules for publicly traded partnerships

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to "require publicly traded financial partnerships to pay the corporate income tax."

As we noted the last time we looked at this promise, partnerships function a little differently than a traditional corporation.

Partnerships have co-owners as opposed to stockholders, for example, and they are treated differently under the tax code. This promise was one of several Obama made that would result in increasing taxes on the wealthy.

In the bill that avoided the fiscal cliff, Obama did enact higher taxes on richer Americans, but not in the way outlined in this promise.

Like a related promise -- to tax "carried interest" as ordinary income rather than capital gains -- this one was not enacted, said Mary Lyman, executive director of the National Association of Publicly Traded Partnerships.

We rate this a Promise Broken.