The Pentagon spent nearly $1 billion last year on unemployment checks for military personnel who may have voluntarily decided not to reenlist, the Associated Press reports:

eligibility for the military compensation requires only that a person served in uniform and was honorably discharged. In other words, anyone who joins the military and serves for several years, then decides not to re-enlist, is potentially eligible for what could amount to more than 90 weeks of unemployment checks.
The program's cost rose from $300 million in 2003 to $928 million last year.

Just in time for Pope Francis, the Census Bureau is out with a new paper on declining private school enrollment. A significant part of the story involves Catholic schools. The paper reports that "while 5.2 million students were enrolled in 13,000 Catholic schools in 1960, only 2.3 million students were enrolled in 7,500 such schools by 2006."

The paper attributes the decline of private school enrollment partly to growth in charter schools, which, though run with more freedom from the public school bureaucracy, are nonetheless taxpayer-funded and tuition-free.

The New York Times, in an article about how a Chinese solar power company, Suntech, is about to be taken over by a Chinese municipal government holding company, reports: "Suntech announced Tuesday that it was closing its factory in Goodyear, Ariz., at the cost of 43 jobs there. The factory put aluminum frames and electrical junction boxes on solar cells imported from China so that the fully assembled solar panels would qualify for 'Buy American' incentives."

Lovely.

The Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan (who was also Mitt Romney's running mate), has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about his proposed budget. It all makes a lot of sense and is better than President Obama's budget, which Mr. Obama hasn't even bothered to put out. But I did have a quibble with one passage, in which Mr. Ryan writes, "a balanced budget will help the economy. Smaller deficits will keep interest rates low, which will help small businesses to expand and hire."

There are at least three reasons I don't find this argument, as framed, particularly convincing.

First, we've just come off a period of enormous deficits during which interest rates have been at historic lows, and in which there hasn't been such of a boom in small business expansion or hiring. That experience is enough to call into question Mr. Ryan's claim.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the Voting Rights Act. He writes:

The Fifteenth Amendment, passed in 1870...entrenched two key constitutional principles. The first one was: "The rights of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." The second gives the Congress the power "to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

In dealing with the Fifteenth Amendment, the term "appropriate" is important. It indicates that Congress cannot do whatever it wants whenever it wants in enforcing the article….The Supreme Court should strike the VRA down and let Congress return to the drawing board for something better.

The New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn's effort to keep Walmart out of New York is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

This one is kind of like the Iran-Iraq war in the sense that some not directly involved hoped it would continue for a long time with extensive casualties on both sides, but for sheer spectator value, it's hard to beat the feud underway between economists Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman. The latest sally from Professor Sachs is here; link viw Mankiw.

The final paragraph of a "political memo" column in today's New York Times is this:

Peter R. Orszag, who was Mr. Obama's first budget director, said, "By making the middle-class tax cuts permanent, we've unfortunately locked into a revenue base that is inadequate."

The Times doesn't say it, but Mr. Orszag's current job is vice chairman of corporate and investment banking and chairman of the financial strategy and solutions group at Citigroup. As a Citibank customer, I find it infuriating that a bank official considers it "unfortunate" that taxes aren't increasing even more than they already did, and I disagree with his analysis that the "revenue base is inadequate."

Hedge fund manager John Paulson is considering moving to Puerto Rico for lower taxes than he pays in New York, Bloomberg News reports.

If it happens, it will be more proof of the falsity of the headline over last month's New York Times column by James B. Stewart, "The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes." Alas, no one seems to have bothered to notify Mr. Paulson that it was actually a "myth," and he's really not supposed to think about moving.

Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law in 1996, has an op-ed piece in the Washington Post calling on the Supreme Court to strike down the law, which defines marriage under federal law as being between a man and a woman, as unconstitutional.

It's interesting that President Clinton is taking this approach rather than asking Congress, particularly the Senate, which has a Democratic majority, to repeal the law. President Obama has been known to fly around the country making speeches urging Congress to act on an issue when he feels strongly enough about it or when he thinks the politics of it favor his side. Yet on this one he, too, seems to be hoping the Court rather than the Congress takes the lead.

Bloomberg View has an op-ed piece from James K. Glassman, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute and the co-author of Dow 36,000. He writes:

For investment gains over the long term, there is absolutely no substitute for faster economic growth.

To get it, we need policy changes that will create a better environment for businesses to increase revenue, profits and jobs: a rational tax system that keeps rates low and eliminates special deductions and credits; immigration laws that encourage the best and the brightest to move here and stay; entitlement reform to bring down costs and provide incentives for productive seniors to keep working; sensible environmental, workplace and financial regulation that allows entrepreneurship to thrive; a K-12 education system that boosts student achievement and holds teachers, administrators and politicians accountable...

Money manager Cliff Asness writes:

six examples of the things I think require more fighting and less compromise:

1) We do not need to compromise on spending; we need to spend less.

2) We do not need to compromise on taxation; we need to tax less and tax with less complication.

3) We do not need to compromise on regulation; we need to regulate less and with less political correctness and nannyism. We need to end the giant, super-powerful government bureaucracies that are not only costly but get "captured" by special interests and then add to cronyism; such bureaucracies are, in their essence, anti-liberty in their wide powers.

4) We do not need to compromise on the amount of crony capital that goes to politicians' friends and to politically correct industries; we need to let everyone stand or fall on merit.

A press release from the law firm Covington & Burling announces:

Senator Jon Kyl, who recently left Congress as the second-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate, is joining Covington & Burling's global public policy and government affairs practice.

… the senator will focus on guiding clients on the policy aspects of tax, health care, defense, national security and intellectual property matters.

…Senator Kyl sat on the Senate Finance Committee, where he was the top Republican on the Subcommittee on Taxation and Internal Revenue Service Oversight. The senator also served as the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism.

In an election on Tuesday, Los Angeles voters rejected, 55 percent to 44 percent, a proposal to increase the city sales tax to 9.5 percent from 9 percent, NBC News reports.

The city's mayor and the police chief had both supported the tax increase, Measure A, which was described on the ballot as the "neighborhood public safety and vital city services funding and accountability measure."

At least Los Angeles voters had a chance to vote directly on the tax increase, which is more than can be said for a lot of other plans raise taxes.

The Boston Globe has an editorial complaining that "new federal regulations written to implement the Affordable Care Act threaten to...saddle thousands of Bay State businesses with big increases in premiums." Governor Patrick apparently sought a waiver, but was unsuccessful. Funny how something called the "Affordable Care Act" wil make health insurance more expensive. It's almost Orwellian.