John Carney proposes that congressional Republicans demand a tax cut in exchange for increasing the debt limit ceiling.

"Wal-Mart, Xerox blame each other for Louisiana shopping gone wild," is the headline over a Reuters dispatch about a situation where food stamp recipients went on shopping sprees with electronic benefit cards that were mistakenly set to allow unlimited spending. From the article:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Xerox Corp blamed each other on Monday after Louisiana food stamp recipients stripped bare the shelves of some Walmart stores when a computer glitch left their debit cards with no limits...

Kayla Whiting, a spokeswoman at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters, pointed to Xerox as the source of the problem and referred further questions to Xerox..."The outage was the result of failures by our contractor, Xerox," said Trey Williams, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Reuters that rather than blaming Walmart or Xerox, someone might want to apportion at least some of the blame to the food stamp recipients themselves.

In the middle of a long New York Times article about New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio's father comes word that a U.S. government panel found that both of his parents had a "sympathetic interest in Communism."

Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller, two of the three economists named Nobel prizewinners today, have been covered by this site in the past. From the archives, posts featuring Professor Fama are here, here, and here. Posts featuring professor Shiller are here, here, here, and here.

Ezra Klein, a left-of-center blogger at the Washington Post, writes to express frustration at what he calls "the ObamaCare disaster":

The Obama administration's top job isn't beating the Republicans. It's running the government well. On this -- the most important initiative they've launched -- they've run the government badly. They deserve all the criticism they're getting and more.

The book JFK, Conservative, which I wrote, will be published tomorrow.

Articles about the book and the ideas in it appear today in:

Larry Summers writes: "If even half the energy that has been devoted over the past five years to 'budget deals' were devoted instead to 'growth strategies' we could enjoy sounder government finances and a restoration of the power of the American example."

That's a bit of a false dichotomy — the two aren't mutually exclusive, after all, and one could argue that getting the American federal budget under control is itself pro-growth because it lifts the inflation fears and fears of tax increases that crimp growth. But there's something to his point, too.

About 900 actors, musicians, authors, architects, and other creative professionals who had been buying their health insurance through The Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust will no longer be able to do so because of a provision in ObamaCare.

"They are upset," said David Rubin, the vice president and corporate secretary of TEIGIT, a Clifton Park, N.Y., health insurance broker that has existed since 1965 but whose business Mr. Rubin said will "fade away" under the new law.

Mr. Rubin noted that in making the case for ObamaCare, the president had repeatedly said that if people like their current employer-provided insurance, they would be able to keep it. "They were told that insurance was going to be unaffected," he said.

But the Affordable Care Act disallows the single-employee sole-proprietor or husband-and-wife businesses from purchasing policies as employers. "One of the troubling things about this is a lot of mom and pop businesses are no longer considered to be a business," Mr. Rubin said. "They are being thrown onto the individual exchanges."

NPR has a six and a half-minute interview with George Will, who is brilliant. Mr. Will:

I sometimes think that when he was at Harvard Law School, Mr. Obama cut class the day they got to the separation of powers, because he seems to consider it not just an inconvenience but an indignity…The Madisonian scheme is for the government to be hard to move. It's supposed to be!

Harvard's president, Drew Faust, has written a letter explaining why the university is not going to divest its endowment from fossil fuels. (From last week, but worth a look if you missed it then.)

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the labor dispute at Carnegie Hall:

The union leaders and their backers, who tout the wage increases and benefit packages from successful actions, do not recognize the heavy toll that their actions impose on everyone else. In today's intellectual climate, unrepentant progressives like New York's mayoral apparent Bill de Blasio continue to prime the pump and garner ecstatic union endorsements, by speaking as if their progressive agenda has a proven track record of success in rehabilitating the fortunes of the middle-class.

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal outlining a proposed deal with President Obama: "Here are just a few ideas to get the conversation started. We could ask the better off to pay higher premiums for Medicare."

Congress just got done raising taxes on higher-income individuals, and now they are going to "ask the better off to pay higher premiums for Medicare"? The "better off" already paid more into Medicare when they were working, because the Medicare payroll tax is a tax on income. One can argue that even that doesn't cover the value of the benefits received, but even so, it would be refreshing to find some Republicans out there who start from the principle that the government should treat everyone the same, rather than dividing people up into categories by income or assets and then trying to solve the federal government's budget problems on the backs of "the better off."

This is one offer I wouldn't be surprised to see President Obama accept, because it fits his ideology.

The government "shutdown" is starting to look a lot like the sequester — a lot of warnings about what a disaster it will be, followed by the discovery that life goes on. That's the topic of my column this week, which expresses the hope that the shutdown will provide an opportunity to discover some of the alternatives to federal-government-provided services. Please check out the column at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), and Newsmax (here).

My book JFK, Conservative, a short political biography of President Kennedy that argues he was a conservative by the standards of both his time and ours, comes out one week from today. If you are in the Washington, D.C., area, you are warmly invited to join me at 7 p.m. on Tuesday October 15 at the Politics and Prose bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW in Washington, to celebrate the book's publication and to buy lots of copies. Even if you are not able to attend, Politics and Prose can take and fulfill orders for signed books via its web site.

There is a lot of material in the book on taxes, spending, growth, and the role of the individual and the state that will be of interest to FutureOfCapitalism readers, so I will be posting some other book-related events and articles as they arise.

Mark Steyn's take is here, and Thomas Sowell's is here.