Senator Schumer is complaining to the Environmental Protection Agency about regulation that would cost New York City more than $1 million to replace old fire hydrants and replace them with ones that would make the water safe to drink from. Mr. Schumer is hardly a right-winger, but this example of federal regulatory overreach is too much even for him.

The $400 million Nathan Cummings Foundation is reducing its Jewish-oriented giving to focus instead on "two specific areas: inequality and climate change," the New York Jewish Week reports.

The Foundation's president and CEO Lance Lindblom earned $1,181,431 in 2011, according to the charity's tax form, which included "a deferred compensation payment of $707,250."

This got lost on the Friday of Thanksgiving week, but it should have gotten more attention. Arnold Kling notices the report in the Detroit News:

Fisker Automotive Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday and the Energy Department sold its green-energy loan for $25 million to investor group Hybrid Tech LLC. Taxpayers will lose $139 million on the $192 million loan to the failed electric vehicle startup, the Energy Department confirmed.

Fisker's lobbying efforts were covered earlier here. Early Fisker investors reportedly included Al Gore, the Silicon Valley venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and the government of Qatar.

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff has given a speech worth reading about why no high-level executives have been prosecuted in relation to the financial crisis. One thing he suggests is that the insider trading cases have distracted prosecutors:

The Washington Examiner's Mark Tapscott notices that the Farm Bill now before Congress includes a proposal, endorsed by President Obama and the National Christmas Tree Association, for a new 15 cent tax on every fresh-cut Christmas tree sold in America.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth does a fine job of debunking President Obama's alarm about rising inequality: "much of this concern is a problem in search of reality, caused by problems of measurement and changes in demographic patterns over the past quarter-century. Spending shows remarkable stability over the past 25 years and, if anything, a narrowing rather than an expansion of inequality."

"The Dallas Independent School District recently announced that every student in the school district will now get a free breakfast and a free lunch. The reason? So few students qualified for 'full price' or 'reduced price' meals that trying to identify them cost more than it was worth," John Goodman reports. More and more schools are serving dinner, too.

Peter Orszag writes at Bloomberg View:

A low-income single parent can experience a marginal rate as high as 95 percent -- for each dollar earned, the person takes home only 5 cents. And for married parents, the marginal rate for the family's secondary earner can be almost as high.
This happens mostly because various means-tested benefit programs are phased out as income increases. ...If we care about encouraging work incentives, these high marginal tax rates for low-income families deserve as much, if not more, attention than the rates for the biggest earners.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's new book, The Classical Liberal Constitution, is the subject of Professor Epstein's column this week. From the column:

When our Supreme Court drops its guard and defers to the federal government on matters of taxation and regulation, we end up with a huge government that saps the energy of a nation and gives us the tragedy that is Obamacare.

Yuval Levin's new book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Somehow, with a Democrat governor, the Democrats controlling both houses of the state legislature, and a Democrat in the White House, "record numbers of homeless families" are "overwhelming" the homeless shelter system in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe reports.

The shelter system is so "overwhelmed" that the state is spending tens of millions of dollars to put homeless families from Boston in motels in Western Massachusetts. The Globe doesn't seem to have considered the possibility that a government-paid stay in a Berkshires hotel at the peak of fall foliage season might be an incentive for some families to declare themselves "homeless."

Doubtless, Congressional Republicans are to blame.

Money manager Clifford Asness has an article in the Financial Analysts Journal under the headline "My Top 10 Peeves."

Virginia Postrel writes on Bloomberg View:

The average American devotes about five hours and 10 minutes a day to "leisure and sports" activity, including two hours and 50 minutes watching television, up from 2 hours and 37 minutes in 2007, according to the 2012 American Time Use Survey done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics...For workers with one full-time job in 2012, those in the bottom income quartile, with weekly pay of $530 or less, averaged about 4 hours and 25 minutes a day in leisure activities, including 2 hours and 36 minutes of television. By contrast, those in the top quartile, making more than $1,291 per week, spent 3 hours and 49 minutes at leisure, including an hour and 55 minutes of TV.

That's a lot of television.

The Treasury Department is out with "initial guidance" that amounts to a chilling crackdown on political activity by tax-exempt organizations established under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Under the proposed guidelines, candidate-related political activity includes "Communications that are made within 60 days of a general election (or within 30 days of a primary election) and clearly identify a candidate or political party" including "Holding an event within 60 days of a general election (or within 30 days of a primary election) at which a candidate appears as part of the program."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the Federal Reserve's dual mandate: "the Fed has to give its undivided attention to inflation—not employment. The dual mandate is a massive distraction. It is far preferable for the Fed to do one task well than two tasks poorly."