"Ya never know what kind of greatness can come out of an American garage."

This Cadillac commercial picks up on a theme I've been sounding here about businesses founded in garages.

From a Bloomberg News article about the future of Graham Holdings, which is the new name of what had been the Washington Post Company after the Washington Post newspaper was sold to Jeff Bezos:

Increased regulation and industry probes have been bad for business in the U.S., and that hurts poor students, Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive officer, said at an investors conference in New York in December.

"Kaplan has cut way down in the last four years on the number of students we serve, from 119,000 at our peak to about 65,000 today," Graham said. "Most of the students we were serving are the nation's poorest and no one is serving them now."

From a New York Times news article:

Mr. Obama made a point of approaching HBO's chief executive, Richard Plepler, at the state dinner for France on Tuesday night.

"Where is my True Detective and Game of Thrones?" Mr. Obama asked Mr. Plepler as he told him that the coming weekend would be a good time to have the DVDs....

After his conversation, Mr. Obama waved over one of his aides to make sure that Mr. Plepler knew where to send the DVDs to ensure they would make it through White House security and end up in the president's hands.

Unexplored by the Times article are the following questions:

Does Mr. Obama plan to pay for these DVDs?

If he doesn't plan to pay for them, are they then gifts, subject to federal ethics laws, including the one that says, "an employee can never solicit or coerce the offering of a gift"?

The interest groups and academics are already lining up to oppose the proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable by Comcast.

"Bad for America...scary," a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Susan Crawford, pronounces at Bloomberg View. (Bloomberg recently had to complain to the FCC about where Comcast was placing Bloomberg Television on its list of channels, as Matthew Keys tweeted).

"An affront to the public interest," harrumphed a former FCC commissioner, Michael Copps, who is now special adviser to Common Cause's Media and Democracy Reform Initiative.

The fear seems to be that the new cable colossus will use its market power to raise prices on consumers.

The Boston Globe reports that Harvard Management Co.'s head of private equity, Lane MacDonald, is leaving to go work for "Fidelity Investments chairman Edward C. 'Ned' Johnson 3d's personal wealth management firm." The article concludes: "The Johnsons moved Crosby Advisors in 2010 from Boston to its current location in Salem, N.H."

The New Hampshire Business Review says a 2006 rewrite of the state's trust laws has attracted trusts and family offices:

Here are some of the reasons New Hampshire is so attractive to trust companies, explained to NHBR by Ardinger and Todd Mayo, head of the trust and estates practice group at the Concord-based Cleveland, Waters and Bass law firm:

The Tax Foundation's blog notices a Los Angeles Times article about a dispute between the IRS and Michael Jackson's estate about the value of the estate. One key issue is the value of Jackson's image, or "likeness":

The estate valued Jackson's likeness at just $2,105.

The IRS put it at $434.264 million.

The Tax Foundation comments:

A postscript to the report here from back in 2011 that ran under the headline "Michelle Obama's Food Desert Myth" comes from NPR, which reports on a professor who:

recently surveyed residents of one low-income community in Philadelphia before and after the opening of a glistening new supermarket brimming with fresh produce. What they're finding, Matthews says, is a bit surprising: "We don't find any difference at all. ... We see no effect of the store on fruit and vegetable consumption."

You'd think that might trigger a reassessment of the $275 million in taxpayer subsidies that Mrs. Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced during their visit to the Philadelphia supermarket.

For those wondering how the Internet wave will affect higher education, University of Chicago professor John Cochrane, the "grumpy economist," has some typically intelligent thoughts on MOOCs, or massive open online courses:

Yes, moocs potentially upend the fundamental economic structure of teaching. Teaching had been a high marginal cost business. Moocs are a nearly zero marginal cost business.

The ObamaCare contraceptive coverage mandate is the topic of classical liberal law professor Richard Epstein's column this week. He describes it as a matter of freedom of contract and freedom of association, not freedom of religion. "It should be flatly unconstitutional for the state to force these mandates on any private organization period."

Tax Prof Paul Caron has a roundup of coverage of the U.S. income tax implications of American athletes who medal at the Sochi Winter Games.

The New York Times (here) and the New York Post (here) have coverage of a new non-profit news organization, The Marshall Project, devoted to covering the criminal justice system, that has been founded by Neil Barsky and will be edited by Bill Keller, a former executive editor of the New York Times, who is leaving his Times column to go work at the startup.

The digital currency Bitcoin, and what Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellin should do about it, is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Reason (here).

Former George W. Bush administration economic official Keith Hennessey has a post looking at what he calls the "trade-off between the ladder and the safety net" on extended unemployment benefits, minimum wage, and ObamaCare:

The costs of all three of these policies include higher structural unemployment and fewer people building additional skills to move up the income scale over time. When the U.S. economy eventually recovers fully, our unemployment rate should be in the low 5s. Because they keep layering on "protections" and "assistance," France's comparable rate is around 10 percent. Imagine if the U.S. steady-state unemployment rate were 10 percent. We're not there yet, but all of President Obama's policies push us toward a European-style model.

The New Yorker has a long article about Amazon. Toward the beginning, it says, "A.T. & T. doesn't build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A.)"

Harvard has managed to foul up its payroll tax reporting for the years 2009 to 2011, the student newspaper, The Crimson, reports:

Due to a mistake in the way the University reported its employees' taxable income, approximately 11,000 Harvard employees paid excess income taxes between 2009 and 2013, with the hardest hit contributing several thousands dollars more than they should have.

The misclassification of earnings occurred after Harvard changed the structure of its supplemental life insurance plan, such that the benefit should no longer have been taxable, according to a letter the Vice President for Human Resources Marilyn Hausammann sent to all affected employees on Feb. 7. Despite the change, the University did not alter the way it reported taxable income, which resulted in employees paying taxes on income that they did not receive.