To be sure, India has achieved enviable success in business services, like the glistening call centers in Bangalore and elsewhere. But in the global jousting for manufacturing jobs, India does not get its share.

China has lunged into the 21st century, while India is still lurching toward it.

During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on “unearned income” have bounced up and down with regularity, and I’ve never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.

Visits to crowded Indian urban centers unleash sensory assaults: colorful dress and lilting chatter provide a backdrop to every manner of commerce, from small shops to peddlers to beggars.

The largest number of jobs likely to be created by the JOBS Act will be for lawyers needed to clean up the mess that it will create.

As a beneficiary of the carried interest loophole, I've seen firsthand the lack of any difference between the work involved in generating a carried interest and the work done by millions of other professionals who are taxed at the full 35 percent rate.

Slapping a catchy acronym like the JOBS Act on a piece of legislation makes it more difficult for politicians to oppose it - and indeed that's what happened with the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act.