Blackstone bewails proposed tax boost

Blackstone Group LP claims its yearly tax tab would increase by $525 million, or triple what it would otherwise pay, under legislation proposed in the Senate. In a letter to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Blackstone said that a tax boost for publicly traded private equity and hedge fund firms and would discourage them from going public, thus depriving the government of revenue it would otherwise have collected as a result of initial stock sales, according to Bloomberg. ``In our opinion, the Baucus-Grassley bill would actually result in a significant net loss of tax revenues by dramatically decreasing the number of firms willing to access the public markets," the letter said. The private equity firm also claims that the tax increase would hurt earnings and take away as much as $10.5 billion of the firm's $25 billion market value.