Commentary's Seth Mandel has a post collecting three recent Obama statements about the shutdown standoff and pointing our why they are clumsy or inapt. The post characterizes them as communications failures but, as is often the case in communications failures, the failure is the underlying thinking of the person doing the communicating, in this case, the president.

The Heritage Foundation usefully blows the whistle on a new 35-cent tax on each ton of paper, to be imposed by the Department of Agriculture under the guise of a "marketing fee" to fund "educational activities, information and programs designed to enhance and broaden the understanding of the use and attributes of paper and paper-based packaging." Such marketing fees are apparently authorized under a 1996 law.

The Heritage post doesn't make any comparisons to the Stamp Act, which was a similar tax on paper (albeit imposed without representation) that Great Britain imposed on its North American colonies and that helped to launch the American revolution.

Let's hope the USDA personnel responsible for this tax are furloughed as a result of the shutdown.

The Heritage post makes the point that after years of the government telling us to help the environment by using less paper, we're now going to be taxed to be told to use more paper.

The pattern of federal agencies spending recklessly at the end of the fiscal year so they use up their whole budgets was the topic of a post here earlier. Now the Washington Post has a wonderful article with even more examples:

This past week, the Department of Veterans Affairs bought $562,000 worth of artwork.

In a single day, the Agriculture Department spent $144,000 on toner cartridges.

From a New York Times article about the cancellation of a planned CNN documentary about Hillary Clinton by filmmaker Charles H. Ferguson:

as Republicans publicly worried that the projects would cast Mrs. Clinton in a favorable light, aides trying to guard her image privately grumbled about the projects, according to a person close to Mrs. Clinton who would not discuss private conversations for attribution.

The aides expressed concern to CNN that a for-profit documentary, which would be released theatrically and broadcast on CNN, would pose a potential conflict with its news coverage, especially since the cable channel had no creative control over it. ...Mr. Ferguson said Mr. Reines had "contacted various people at CNN, interrogated them and expressed concern about alleged conflicts of interest generated because my film was a for-profit endeavor."

The government shutdown standoff will be a win for Republicans no matter how it ends, I argue in my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), or Newsmax (here).

The economist David Malpass points out that one thing that wouldn't be shut down in a government shutdown is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It is part of the Federal Reserve, which is funded through its fees and trading operations. A news article from over the summer reported that the CFPB is spending $95 million to renovate a 300,000-square-foot Washington office building for its 1,200 employees.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger quotes a representative of an accounting firm advising on how important it is to keep your income low enough to qualify for the ObamaCare subsidies:

Another area that demands consideration is how changes to one's income or household size will affect any federal subsidy he or she gets to buy health insurance, said Brian Haile, senior vice president of health care policy at Jackson Hewitt Tax Services.

Those whose household income is at 400 percent or less of the federal poverty level may be eligible for a subsidy to buy insurance from the marketplace exchange opening in New Jersey on Tuesday. The government can either make the payment directly to the insurance company or provide a credit to you on the following year's tax returns.

The danger, however, is if someone goes over that 400-€…percent mark, thanks to an unexpected raise or bonus. If they do, Haile said, they will be required to pay back every dollar the federal government spent toward their premiums.

Of all the legacies of Mayor Bloomberg, who would have thought that one would have been an emphatic and concise rejection of the obsession with income inequality? Yet here it is, courtesy of the New York Times, which reports that "In 2011, [the 1,041] New Yorkers who made more than $10 million annually accounted for nearly one-fifth of the city's personal income tax revenue, which is second only to property taxes as a revenue source."

Here's the key passage of the Times article regarding Mr. Bloomberg's response to the criticism of income inequality in New York:

Bill de Blasio, the Democratic mayoral candidate, has repeatedly portrayed New York as becoming two cities under Mr. Bloomberg's stewardship.

But the Bloomberg administration has strongly defended its economic record.

The consulting company McKinsey "helped invent what we think of as American capitalism and spread it to every corner of the world," Duff McDonald writes in his new book The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business.

If one accepts Mr. McDonald's idea of McKinsey as a stand-in for American capitalism, then it's not a particularly heroic tale.

The New York Times had two interesting recent items on JPMorgan Chase. The first was a shrewd column by Andrew Ross Sorkin quoting Columbia professor John C. Coffee Jr. to the effect that a big SEC fine on JPMorgan Chase for its losses in the London Whale case just serves to punish the firm's shareholders, who were already victimized once:

on the merits of the case, the settlement, Mr. Coffee said, begins to look a lot like bribery — to some degree, on both sides. Without a strong case against any individuals, the S.E.C. looks as if it held the firm for ransom. And on the other side, the firm's senior management appears to have bribed the S.E.C., using shareholder money, not to bring cases against individuals...."This is a case about imposing a fine on someone who suffered a burglary for not taking adequate steps to avoid the burglary."

We're trying a little experiment here in running the quarterly drive for paying subscribers without the usual weeklong series of sales pitches. Notices went out yesterday afternoon to those paying subscribers who are up for renewal. Thanks to those of you who re-upped. We're already at 75 percent of our quarterly goal without the usual lists of "ten reasons you should become a paying subscriber" and "ten more reasons" and the frequently asked questions (and answers). So if you have been thinking about becoming a paying subscriber, please go ahead and pitch in. Your paid subscription helps make everything here possible and will allow us to keep growing, expanding, and improving. Only paying subscribers get to receive our quarterly special behind-the-scenes report on the site's operations and plans. An entry-level subscription is less than $1 a week, and the transaction won't take much of your time at all. As soon as a few more customers respond, we can return to the regularly scheduled programming. The link is here.

The House Republican food stamp bill assailed as a cut in fact increases spending on food stamps and includes provisions mandating a study of the nutritional benefits of white potatoes and funding the consumption of marine mammals (a category that includes polar bears and seals) by Native Americans. The bill and the inaccurate depiction of it is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

"Scientists working on a landmark U.N. report on climate change are struggling to explain why global warming appears to have slowed down in the past 15 years even though greenhouse gas emissions keep rising," the Associated Press reports. The article includes some possible explanations, including "cooling effects from volcanic eruptions" and "more heat being transferred to the deep ocean."

There's been a lot of recent press coverage of the proposed SEC rule requiring companies to disclose the median salaries of employees, along with the ratio of that median to the compensation of the CEO.

A CEO of our acquaintance observes that the coverage has missed a key point: coupled with "say on pay," the proposed rule creates a disincentive for CEO's to hire unskilled workers. For example, a publicly traded manufacturing company that refuses to outsource factory jobs overseas is going to have a skewed median because factories, by their nature, will employ far more floor workers that higher salaried engineers and other employees. As a result, the ratio between the CEO's salary and the median will look outsized even if the CEO's actual salary is appropriate. On the other hand, by outsourcing the factory jobs, the ratio will look much better. We claim to want to encourage manufacturing jobs, but in the end, rules like this favor banks and tech companies, the bulk of whose employees have at least a college degree. It's a funny thing to punish companies for hiring lots of people who lack the same degree of formal education.

Writing in Forbes, Harry Binswanger suggests a tax reform: "It turns out that the 99% get far more benefit from the 1% than vice-versa....For their enormous contributions to our standard of living, the high-earners should be thanked and publicly honored. We are in their debt.... Anyone who earns a million dollars or more should be exempt from all income taxes. ... And the real issue is not financial, but moral. So to augment the tax-exemption, in an annual public ceremony, the year's top earner should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor."