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The Wall Street Journal reports:

"What we're proposing is a tax reform, it's not a tax cut," a Romney campaign staffer said.

The anonymous staffer is doubtless taking his cues from the candidate himself. But it does crystallize how poorly the Romney message is being crafted. Even if Romney proposes to keep tax rates the same, that would be a tax cut compared to both current law, under which taxes are scheduled to increase dramatically because of the expiration of existing tax cuts (the payroll tax holiday, the extension of the Bush tax cuts won after Republicans won the House in 2010), and compared to President Obama's plans to increase taxes. But he's not proposing to keep rates the same; he's proposing to reduce them by 20%. Yet he still won't describe that as a tax cut.

James Bovard has a USA Today op-ed piece critical of the expansion of government-provided school breakfasts to children who aren't poor:

Unfortunately, at the same time brakes are being tapped on caloric intake at lunch, the Obama administration is championing a vast expansion of the school breakfast program. At the same time some kids are getting smaller lunches, others are having multiple breakfasts.

Twelve million kids currently eat school breakfasts, but that number will soar. Under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, all schools with 40% low-income students will be allowed to offer free breakfasts and lunch to all students. That will lead to expanding waistlines. New York City recently suspended expansion of its Breakfast in the Classrooms after discovering that 20% of pupils were eating two breakfasts -- one at home and another at school. An Agriculture Department (USDA) pilot program produced similar findings.

Fareed Zakaria's latest Washington Post column: "It is obvious that, with a deficit at 8 percent of gross domestic product, any solution to our budgetary problems has to involve both spending cuts and tax increases."

It may be obvious to Mr. Zakaria, but it's not obvious to me. With federal tax receipts for 2011 at a nominal $2.3 trillion, the budget could be balanced by just bringing federal spending back to the 2004 level of about $2.3 trillion, which shouldn't be that difficult — 2004 was not that long ago. Yielding to Mr. Zakaria's logic would mean any politician who wants to ram through a tax increase should just go on a huge spending binge, run up a huge deficit, and then, afterward, argue that it is "obvious" that tax cuts are needed to pay for it.

Better Capitalism: Renewing the Entrepreneurial Strength of the American Economy, a new book by Robert E. Litan and Carl J. Schramm, is worth buying just for this single spectacular sentence about how immigrant entrepreneurs build the American economy:

The House Ethics Committee released a statement with its ruling on the matter of Maxine Waters, a Democratic Congresswoman from California who is in line, following Barney Frank's retirement, to be the top Democrat on the House Financial Services committee. It found that there was no clear, convincing evidence that Ms. Waters violated House rules when she hired her grandson as her chief of staff and when the chief of staff then got involved in a government issue that affected "OneUnited Bank, in which Representative Waters' husband held stock and for which he had previously served on the Board of Directors."

I tend to think such matters should be left to voters (or, when appropriate, prosecutors) rather than ethics committees, but it's an interesting statement on the House's ethical standards, even under the current Republican House leadership. The Los Angeles Times coverage is here.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the strike by Chicago public school teachers: "With less to offer, union ranks have shrunk to, today, about seven percent of the market from a high of about 35 percent in the mid-1950s."

President Obama's statement the other night, "Taxes are lower on families than they've been probably in the last 50 years. So I haven't raised taxes," is the subject of my column this week. Please check it out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Voters in Brookline, Mass. will vote this November on banning Styrofoam cups, the Boston Globe reports.

If the ban passes, Brookline, a Boston suburb that was home to John F. Kennedy and Michael Dukakis, would join the Berkshires town of Great Barrington, which already has a ban on the containers for both food and beverages.

Answers to some frequently asked questions about the quarterly drive for paid subscriptions and memberships, which has been going on here this week:

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Daniel Greenfield, also known as Sultan Knish, writes:

In the real world, Romney is still running neck and neck with Obama among registered voters, the non-stop gaffe express exists only in the minds of the media, which manufactures stories that fit the narrative, then reports on the narrative and discusses the narrative to death until enough people confuse it with reality.

The Romney campaign is not flailing and it is not guilty of missteps; what it is, is under constant attack by a massive leftist bloc composed of think-tanks, campaign operatives and the media who then use their own attacks to manufacture a narrative of incompetence. Each attack is then called a "gaffe" and used as evidence that the campaign is flailing.

Our quarterly drive for paying readers begins today. Here are ten reasons to become a paying member or subscriber.

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From the "60 Minutes" interview with Mitt Romney:

Pelley: There is a lot of rhetoric about Medicare. What do you intend to do?

Romney: Well, I don't want any change to Medicare for current seniors or for those that are nearing retirement. So the plan stays exactly the same. The president's cutting $716 billion from current Medicare. I disagree with that. I'd put those dollars back into Medicare.

Pelley: Mr. Ryan has proposed something similar, almost precisely the same number, 716.

Romney: Yeah. He was going to use that money to reduce the budget deficit. I'm putting it back into Medicare and I'm the guy running for president, not him.

There you have it, in a nutshell. Mitt Romney is the guy running on a promise to spend $716 billion more on Medicare than either Paul Ryan or Barack Obama. To voters concerned about entitlement spending and the effect on the deficit and debt, the message sent is, "I'm not your guy."

From the "60 Minutes" interview with Mitt Romney:

Pelley: What would the individual federal income tax rates be?

Romney: Well, they would be the current rates less 20 percent. So the top rate, for instance, would go from 35 to 28. Middle rates would come down by 20 percent as well. All the rates come down. But unless people think there's going to be a huge reduction in the taxes they owe, that's really not the case. Because we're also going to limit deductions and exemptions, particularly for people at the high end. Because I want to keep the current progressivity in the code. There should be no tax reduction for high income people. What I would like to do is to get a tax reduction for middle income families by eliminating the tax for middle income families on interest, dividends, and capital gains.

Pelley: The tax rate for everyone in your plan would go down.

Romney: That's right.

Ross Douthat makes a pretty nifty New York Times column out of the fact noted here the other day, that seven of the ten richest counties in America are in the Washington, D.C. area. He writes:

Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington's one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector's work. [He doesn't mention the journalists, but they're doing okay too, at least the ones writing for the lobbyist audiences at places like Bloomberg Government and Politico Pro.]...