Members of Congress are trying to figure out how to exempt themselves and their staff members from having to get their health insurance through the exchanges that are part of ObamaCare, Politico reports:

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty…. Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.

"George W. Bush is smarter than you" is the headline Keith Hennessey puts on a post about his former boss. Highlights:

President Bush intentionally aimed his public image at average Americans rather than at Cambridge or Upper East Side elites. Mitt Romney's campaign was predicated on "I am smart enough to fix a broken economy," while George W. Bush's campaigns stressed his values, character, and principles rather than boasting about his intellect. He never talked about graduating from Yale and Harvard Business School, and he liked to lower expectations by pretending he was just an average guy. Example: "My National Security Advisor Condi Rice is a Stanford professor, while I'm a C student. And look who's President. <laughter>"

A Bloomberg News dispatch reports, "The U.S. Mint ran out of its smallest American Eagle gold coin after demand surged…Sales of the coins weighing a 10th of an ounce were suspended after demand more than doubled in 2013 from a year earlier, the Mint said yesterday in a statement. Total sales of American Eagles in April have almost tripled from a month earlier, according to its website."

The Boston Marathon bombings are the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the Fourth Amendment's restrictions on searches and seizures, including a case that split the Supreme Court 5 to 4, with Scalia, Thomas, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan finding a drug-sniffing dog on a front-porch unconstitutional, while Justices Alito, Roberts, Kennedy, and Breyer found it constitutional.

The New Yorker has an interesting article by James Surowiecki about "the underground recovery":

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial this morning highlighting an American Federation of Teachers report that divides professional money managers into two groups — a "watch list"of managers that have any "directors, managers, advisers and executives" who "have contributed to, or sit on the governing board of" organizations that favor a move to defined-contribution pension plans, and a "worker-friendly" list of companies "that have publicly and credibly declared their neutrality."

The AFT headlined its press release about the report, "AFT spotlights investment managers' unsavory connections."

Bill Gates gives an interview to Wired magazine and says:

There's only one metric by which the US is going backward—the amount of education per dollar. That's pretty impressive, because we've doubled the amount we spend over the past 25 years. The actual achievement scores are up a tiny bit. Well, actually it's mostly flat, and that's because we aren't really studying what works and what doesn't, so why should we expect to have improved? As long as classroom experience stays the same, it probably won't educate kids any better than it did 20 years ago.

I'd argue that there are other metrics by which the US is going backward, too. The amount of government debt is rising, and marginal tax rates are rising, and the percentage of people who are working has declined (which is bad if you think work is good, but I suppose not so bad if you are enjoying a relaxing retirement).

A blog post by Rituparna Basu takes a look at a New England Journal of Medicine editorial about Vermont's health care system and notes that amid all the praise of the system, the editorial didn't mention much —anything, as far as I can see — about the quality of the health care provided. The blog post says, "The reason there is such little concern with the quality of care is that the leading advocates of government control over the medical field are motivated by egalitarianism—the notion that everybody should have equal health care, even if that care is equally shoddy."

Senator Pat Toomey, the Republican of Pennsylvania who co-led the gun legislation effort, issued a statement after the Senate voted it down:

I did what I thought was the right thing for our country. I sought out a compromise position that I thought could move the ball forward on an important matter of public safety. My only regret is that our amendment did not pass. It's not the outcome I hoped for, but the Senate has spoken on the subject, and it's time to move on. We have a lot of other very important issues to deal with such as getting the economy back on track, dealing with the debt ceiling and creating more jobs for Pennsylvanians

Economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt have sent a response to Politico addressing the concerns about their paper that we mentioned in a post here yesterday. The paper is about the negative effects of government debt on economic growth.

"Mr. Johnson imposed his strategy without first testing his ideas on a small scale in a few locations to see how consumers respond, and perhaps his hubris is exceeded only by President Obama and his planners." — Wall Street Journal editorial, J.C. Penney and Politics, April 13, 2013.

"don't buy the narrative that Mr. Johnson was done in by his hubris and cluelessness about retail...One indictment of Mr. Johnson concerns his failure to test-market Penney's new 'no-discount' policy. But this would have been to concede defeat at the starting line." — Holman Jenkins column, Wall Street Journal editorial page, April 16, 2013.

Bloomberg L.P. — the company owned by Mayor Bloomberg, whose rule over New York City has been something short of laissez faire when it comes to regulations — is reportedly suing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to try to block a new rule relating to what Reuters calls "cleared swaps margin."

Bloomberg's lawyer is Eugene Scalia, according to the Reuters dispatch.

The left is abuzz about an error in the 2010 paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff showing that when debt reaches 90 percent of GDP or more it has a negative effect on growth. Expect to hear a lot more about this, as if the entire notion that there might be some limits to how much it's advisable for a government to borrow rests on this one paper.

Update: Here, as predicted, is Paul Krugman.

The booming business in "compliance" is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax here and at Reason here.