Senator Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, is proposing a law that would ban professional sports leagues with more than $10 million in revenue from having tax-exempt status. Mother Jones has a news article. The bill hasn't collected a single co-sponsor yet, so chances for its passage seem remote. There is no NFL team in Oklahoma.

Bloomberg News has an article about a legal gift-and-estate-tax avoidance maneuver called the Walton grantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT, which is a fine example of how these taxes work to enrich tax lawyers without doing much in the way or raising federal revenue or reducing inequality.

Actually, there are four secrets: faith, family, community, and work. This YouTube video is 19 minutes, 45 seconds. I thought it was worth my time even though I've already read two of Mr. Brooks' books and have seen him speak in person at least twice. I particularly liked the section on the study looking at the happiness of lottery winners and quadriplegics. I also liked the way Mr. Brooks related the material to his own life story.

Is there a politician out there who can explain this stuff as well as Brooks, who runs the American Enterprise Institute, can? Not that I know of. Is this guy running for president of the United States? If not, why not?

There's quite a bit of press attention surrounding the release of the Chronicle of Higher Education's annual survey of college president compensation for the year 2011. Bloomberg, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe all have stories.

One element of it that struck me as particularly newsworthy was the way that some of the big money comes as golden parachutes or exit payments. From the Globe article:

The survey found that in 2011, Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun, received $3.1 million in total compensation, more than every other college and university chief except University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer, who had a total compensation of $3.4 million.

The Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Transportation are toying with changing the rules for in-flight cellphone use, but, at least to judge by this Bloomberg report, the approach is a top-down, one-rule-fits-all approach. So long as there's no safety issue, why not let the airlines themselves set their own rules and compete to attract either travelers who want quiet cabins or travelers who want to talk on their phones? Maybe they want to handle it with separate seating areas, a la the Amtrak "Quiet Car," or with premium pricing for either quiet or the ability to talk on the phone. Let the customers and the airlines decide it rather than the federal bureaucrats. Certainly the airlines have experience in trying to cater to certain market segments with everything from blue potato chips to more legroom in coach.

The New York Times takes the "Authors Guild to Terminate Health Insurance" story covered here back in October and and broadens it out to include doctors and lawyers. From the Times article:

It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people – liberal, concerned with social justice – who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms. Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better health care for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.

It is an uncomfortable position for many members of the creative classes to be in. "We are the Obama people," said Camille Sweeney, a New York writer and member of the Authors Guild. Her insurance is being canceled, and she is dismayed that neither her pediatrician nor her general practitioner appears to be on the exchange plans.

Charles Krauthammer writes:

The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. ...Obama's discovery that government bureaucracies don't do things very well creates a breathtaking disconnect between his transformative ambitions and his detachment from the job itself. How does his Olympian vision coexist with the lassitude of his actual governance, a passivity that verges on absenteeism?

The Census Bureau has released its list of the 13 counties with the highest median incomes for the year 2012, and eight of the 13 are in the Washington, D.C. region. The Washington Post's explanation is that "The Washington area has reigned at the top of the most affluent counties for years, in large part because it has so many residents with college degrees working at professional jobs. That gives the region a disproportionately large share of two-income households in which both adults have well-paying jobs."

The one thing that Washington has that Silicon Valley or even Westchester County in N.Y. or Fairfield County in Connecticut do not have is the power to tax the rest of the country to support a $3.5 trillion federal government.

The Massachusetts ObamaCare exchange Web site was down for 15 hours yesterday and this morning for "planned maintenance and upgrade activities."

Can you think of a commercial Web site that would plan to be offline for 15 hours in the middle of a peak shopping period?

The New York Post reports:

As if a significantly larger contract wasn't incentive enough, the Seattle Mariners offered Robinson Cano something that no state in the metropolitan area could offer — no state income tax.

Cano, who agreed to a deal last week with the Mariners for $240 million over 10 years, besting the Yankees' seven-year, $175 million offer, will actually earn roughly $107 million more on his new contract instead of staying with the only team he has ever known.

Because Washington does not have a state income tax, the All-Star second baseman's deal is worth about $42 million more in after-tax pay than the Yankees' offer, according to Robert Raiola — a certified public accountant who specializes in sports and entertainment — who spoke with Bloomberg News.

Link via Frazer Rice.

The success of Charles Krauthammer's book is one sign among many that neoconservatism is on the rise. My column this week discusses that trend and Dr. Krauthammer's interview with Jon Stewart in which Dr. Krauthammer gave liberals credit for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and said Republicans should focus on reforming them, not rolling them back. Please check the column out at Newsmax here.

Twenty-eight members of the Santa Monica, Calif., Police Department earned more than $200,000 last year, the Santa Monica Daily Press reports. "The top-paid member, a sergeant, made $314, 360."

Blogger Steve Bartin comments: "This will not be part of Barack Obama's next speech on inequality."

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is out with an analysis of "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010," which, unlike many other such studies, includes payroll taxes, federal excise taxes, and the corporate income tax paid by individual shareholders. It's a 36-page PDF with lots of nifty charts and graphs that is well worth a look for anyone interested in such matters.

From Rush Limbaugh's radio program:

Now, there is a piece here, Associated Press, and it's by a woman named Hope Yen. "Fully 20% of US adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America's economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation's income inequality." Now, folks, that paragraph is astounding. The paragraph acknowledges that people move in and out of income brackets.

Mickey Kaus writes on four things the mainstream media won't tell you about President Obama's inequality speech (No. 1: It's gotten worse on his watch.)