Looks like fun. I wonder if there is an inaugural ball for the coal, oil, and gas industry? From an email invitation:

What: The 2013 Green Inaugural Ball

Who: Co-Hosted by: American Renewable Energy Institute, American Rivers, As You Sow, American Wind Energy Association, Blue Green Alliance, Carbon War Room, Defenders of Wildlife, Earth Policy Institute, ecoAmerica. Energy Action Coalition, Energy & Environment for Obama, Environment America, Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital, Geothermal Energy Association, Green For All, Greenpeace, League of Conservation Voters, National Audubon Society, National Hydropower Association, National Parks Conservation Association, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Oceana, Sierra Club, Solar Energy Industry Association, Solar Electric Power Association, The Trust for Public Land, UN Foundation, The Vote Solar Initiative, The Wilderness Society, World Alliance for Decentralized Energy (host committee in formation)

When: January 20, 2013

From Bloomberg News, via the Washington Examiner:

Health insurance premiums may as much as double for some small businesses and individual buyers in the U.S. when the Affordable Care Act's major provisions start in 2014, Aetna Inc.'s chief executive officer said.

While subsidies in the law will shield some people, other consumers who make too much for assistance are in for "premium rate shock," Mark Bertolini, who runs the third-biggest U.S. health-insurance company, told analysts yesterday at a conference in New York...."We're going to see some markets go up as much as as 100 percent."

Lovely. This is another way that income is redistributed outside the tax code (college financial aid is another). President Obama has been asking for the rich to "pay a little more" through higher tax rates. But if their health insurance costs double but they don't qualify for the ObamaCare subsidies because they earn too much money the effect is similar.

Speaker Boehner and his Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan are out with a new graphic to support their claim that "spending is the problem." I agree that spending is the problem (as opposed to the President's theory that insufficiently high tax rates on the "rich" are the problem). But I don't think the graph is particularly useful.

The big spending mountain in the graph is between 2025 and 2041. That is a long, long way away. What the graph shows is that "spending will be the problem."

Today is the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's speech to the New York Economic Club, which to this day stands out as a landmark in making the argument that the economic growth generated by tax cuts winds up generating more revenue for the government; in other words, that at a certain level tax cuts decrease the federal deficit rather than increase it:

I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last 5 years that our present tax system, developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.

The state of Maryland is trying to solve the problem of the shortage of organs sought for transplants by changing the default option on drivers licenses. It used to be you could check a box and volunteer to be an organ donor. Now, the Maryland news site Gazette.Net reports, "under the proposed legislation, you no longer 'opt in' to be an organ donor; you are presumed to be an organ donor unless you 'opt out.' That's right, from now on your driver's license application would have a box you must check if you want to keep your body organs from becoming state property."

This may strike even some advocates of organ donation as being a bit much.

Patrick Hruby at SportsOnEarth.com has an extensive rundown of all the ways taxpayers subsidize sports:

Adding insult to financial injury, federal lawmakers once tried to close this loophole -- and being federal lawmakers, they instead made the problem worse. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 required municipal bonds to become taxable if more than 10 percent of the debt for a facility built mainly for non-government use (read: stadiums) was to be repaid with revenue from a private business. The idea? Cities that were using rent, game ticket surcharges and other sports-related fees to repay stadium bonds would stop gaming the tax code, because really, no municipality in its right and responsible mind would shift 90 percent of stadium debt onto the general public. The unintended outcome? Municipalities started doing just that.

...

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is the way that it allows individuals and institutions new power to talk back to the press. Here is Cardinal Dolan of New York, blogging about a recent federal court decision in the legal challenge brought by the Archdiocese of New York against the ObamaCare free contraceptive coverage mandate:

Did you hear about the decision last week by U.S. District Court Judge Brian M. Cogan in the lawsuit brought by the Archdiocese of New York, ArchCare, (the agency coordinating our Catholic healthcare in the archdiocese) and three plaintiffs from the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island, against the administration for the unconstitutional HHS mandate?

There's a major push under way to extend to New York State elections the same system of public financing that in New York City matches every one dollar contributed to a campaign with six dollars in taxpayer funding. The argument made is that the New York City program is a "success" and a "national model," but in fact the re-election rate for incumbents on the New York City Council is almost as overwhelming as the body's domination by a single political party. Some of the state's largest labor unions representing government-funded employees are behind the campaign, which would probably make it even easier than it is now for them to elect tax-and-spend politicians in Albany.

Keith Hennessey has a useful post outlining a fallback position for House Republicans — pass a Senate bill that, as he describes it:

• extends for one year all current income tax rates for incomes <$200K (single) and <$250K (married);
• For one year it keeps the capital gains rate at 15% for the same incomes as above;
• For one year it (explicitly) raises the capital gains and dividends rates to 20% for incomes >$200K/$250K;
• It extends for one year other provisions of current law, important and not-so-important: marriage penalty relief and the child credit, education tax relief, and a handful of smaller provisions; and
• It patches the AMT for 2012.

It's not a great option, but it could be better than whatever deal President Obama and Speaker Boehner come up with.

Harvard economist Edward Glaeser writes in a Bloomberg View column:

The Republicans should also demand consolidation of federal social policies. The U.S. has six large programs -- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, food stamps, housing vouchers, unemployment insurance and the earned-income tax credit -- spread across four Cabinet departments and the Internal Revenue Service.

Every one of the six plans encourages recipients to earn less, because aid levels are tied to income. Although the adverse incentives in an individual program are moderate, collectively they can represent an effective tax rate far exceeding 50 percent. (How this works: The federal housing vouchers follow a 30 percent rule -- you spend 30 percent of your income on housing if you have a voucher. If your income goes up by a dollar, 30 cents of it goes for increased housing payments. With food stamps, for every extra dollar you earn, your allotment goes down by 30 cents. Putting the two programs together adds up to a 60 percent tax on earnings.)

The pay of employees of the California state government is the topic of a Bloomberg News article:

The story of one prison psychiatrist shows how pay largesse has spread.

Mohammad Safi, graduate of a medical school in Afghanistan, collected $822,302 last year, up from $90,682 when he started in 2006, the data show. Safi was placed on administrative leave in July and is under investigation by the Department of State Hospitals, formerly the Department of Mental Health...Last year, 16 psychiatrists on California's payroll, including Safi, made more than $400,000.

Forty-five California Highway Patrol Officers earned more than $200,000 in 2011, and more than 5,000 of the troopers made $100,000 or more that year, the article says.

Seventeen Senate Democrats, including Senator-Elect Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senators Franken and Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Senator Durbin of Illinois, have written a letter to the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, calling for repeal of the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices that is part of ObamaCare. A press release from Senator Franken says, "I am concerned that we are running out of time before this job-killing tax goes into effect."

Maybe they should have thought of that before they voted for the ObamaCare law that they now want to revise.

The "job-killing tax," as Senator Franken calls it, is scheduled to go into effect January 1.

It's nice to see Democrats opposing tax increases and acknowledging that there is a connection between taxes and employment levels.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week says the Supreme Court should make it clear that the Food and Drug Administration shouldn't be able to stop drug companies from circulating information about "off-label" uses of their products:

On high principle, the FDA has long insisted that any drug company promotion of off-label uses undermines the integrity of its preapproval system. But even as the FDA criminally prosecutes drug companies for such promotion, information about the off-label uses still gets around. Thus, between 25 and 60 percent of drugs are prescribed for off-label uses. For cancer patients, that number may be as high as 65 percent; patients on dialysis or those with AIDS are also high consumers of off-label products.

President Obama and Speaker Boehner both claim to favor open and transparent government, but they won't say what happened at their meeting on Sunday about the federal budget. That's the topic of my column this week. Please read it at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), or Newsmax (here).

The Weekly Standard's William Kristol suggests Republicans should seek a deal:

If we go over the cliff, there won't be damage to Obama's chances of second-term success. Quite the contrary. What Republicans will have done is to make Democrats the party of tax cuts and Obama a president fighting for economic growth....If the House Republicans now follow the Wall Street Journal editors over the cliff, the only effect, I'm afraid, will be to turn a manageable tactical retreat in December into a panicked strategic rout in January.