Amity Shlaes has a column on eliminating the tax deduction for home-mortgage interest: "2012 is also the time when we most need the $100 billion or so from the elimination."

I think the "we" she means here is taxpayers who would benefit from what she calls "the removal of other tax distortions, including excessively high income-tax rates," rather than politicians who would surely love to find a way to spend that $100 billion that is now in the pockets of mortgage-paying homeowners but would otherwise be flowing to Washington in the form of taxes.

It seems to me it is worth doing as part of a broader tax simplification, but not as a thinly disguised tax increase.

Mitt Romney's acceptance-speech line on taxes — "I will not raise taxes on the middle class of America" — is, in politician-ese, a warning that anyone Mr. Romney thinks is wealthier than middle class can expect a tax increase in his administration. His failure to mention in the speech his campaign's stated, specific plan to cut tax rates is a major lapse, and a sign, perhaps, that he doesn't expect to follow through on such tax cuts if elected.

The second night of the Republican National Convention reinforced the party's first-night message linking the Republican Party to the American dream of immigrant upward mobility and hard work.

Senator Rand Paul spoke about Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants and about his own immigrant great-grandfather.

Senator Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said:

Back in 1906, two Norwegian brothers named Nicolai and Matthew Gjelsvik came to this country in search of the American Dream. When they reached the shores of America, the only English words they knew were "apple pie" and "coffee," which evidently they had plenty of on the trip over.

What a heart-warming set of Republican National Convention remarks prepared for delivery by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, picking up on the immigrant-success-story theme the Republicans (and this site) highlighted last night:

In Bowling Green, Kentucky, the Taing family owns the Great American Donut shop. Their family fled war-torn Cambodia to come to this country. My kids and I love to eat doughnuts, so we go there frequently.

The Taings work long hours. Mrs. Taing told us that the family works through the night to make doughnuts. The Taing children have become valedictorians and National Merit Scholars.

The Taings from Cambodia are an American success story so, Mr. President, don't you go telling the Taings: "You didn't build that."

When you say they didn't build it, you insult each and every American who ever got up at the crack of dawn. You insult any American who ever put on overalls or a suit.

Bloomberg News has an article headlined "Donors Invest Millions in Romney for Billions in Returns," outlining ways "a Romney presidency might pay off -- literally -- for some of these super-donors." It will be interesting to see whether Bloomberg publishes a similar article at the Democratic convention outlining the ways in which an Obama administration might pay off for President Obama's big campaign contributors.

One of the most inspiring things about the first night's program of the Republican National Convention was the way it highlighted the achievements of children of immigrants.

Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, spoke about how his father had come to America from Italy at age 7 and worked as a coal miner until he was 72. Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, spoke of how his father fled Cuba in 1957 with $100 sewn into his underwear and, after arriving in America, worked washing dishes for 50 cents an hour. Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, spoke of her experience as the daughter of immigrants from India. Her parents started a small business out of the living room of their home. Ann Romney, the wife of the presidential candidate, spoke of her father who came to America from Wales at age 15. Mia Love, the Republican mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, is the daughter of parents who came here from Haiti with just $10. The keynote speaker, the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, spoke of his "Irish father" and "Sicilian mother," though he did not specify whether they were immigrants.

One of the points I make in my column this week is that Mitt Romney is making a mistake if he tries to run as the champion of the middle class instead of rejecting efforts to divide Americans into classes.

The Pew Research Center advances this divisive agenda by releasing, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, a poll that divides Americans into "upper" (which includes "upper-middle"), "middle," and "lower" classes, and then asking them a lot of questions about their health, happiness, and household finances.

The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and the decision to cancel the first day of the Republican National Convention because of rain are the topics of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here) or the New York Sun (here).

The Wall Street Journal has an article about a cardiology patient who had three echocardiograms.

Cardiogram A cost his insurer $373.

Cardiogram B, six months later, "cost his insurer $1605," but the patient, who had a high-deductible plan, "had to pay about $1,000 of the larger bill out of his own pocket."

Cardiogram C, earlier this year, and the most recent of the three, cost $265.31.

The Journal makes from this a headline and news article about how health care costs are rising because of the transition to B from A, attributing the higher costs in B to the fact that independent medical practices are being bought up by hospitals. But the transition to C from B, which the Journal buries toward the end of the article, may be the more newsworthy one: the news that because patients are increasingly paying for their own health care through these high deductible plans, prices are actually being driven down as consumers shop around. It all depends on how the story is framed.

Via the Times of Israel and the Commentator comes the news that the British Broadcasting Corporation has spent more than $500,000 in legal fees to try to prevent the public release of the Balen Report, which examined the BBC's coverage of Israel. Keep an eye out for an editorial on this topic from the New York Times, which recently hired the head of the BBC to become the new CEO of the New York Times Company.

What a wonderful letter to the editor in the Summer issue of Brandeis Magazine from Karen Bernstein, the chairman and editor in chief of BioCentury publications. It reads, in part:

We don't need yet more regulators — who have no idea how to run a successful company — to lay yet more burdens on us. Indeed, adding regulations only increases costs and discourages hiring. I know this has been said many times before, but those who don't run companies somehow don't seem to believe it.

Growing the size of government will ultimately result in the kind of economic stagnation and government bankruptcy that we are witnessing, not just around the world, but at the state and municipal level in the U.S. and soon, we will see, at the federal level. The numbers are quite clear for those who do the math.

So many entrepreneurs agree with this, and yet so few are willing to say it publicly with their names and their company's name attached.

Harvard professor Niall Ferguson has posted an article defending himself from the hordes demanding that he be fired from his tenured faculty post for having had the temerity to suggest that President Obama should not be re-elected:

The art of the modern witch hunt is to get as many like-minded bloggers as possible to repeat and preferably exaggerate the claims until finally it becomes received opinion that you are on the brink of being fired and indeed deported in chains.

...there comes a point when you have to ask yourself: has the American public sphere so degenerated that it is now impossible to make the case for a change of president without being set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously well-organized gang of the current incumbent's most ideologically committed supporters?

Frederick Van Bennekom, a FutureOfCapitalism community member who is a professional survey design expert at Great Brook, sends some thoughts on the latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll:

The Key finding of the NY Times, CBS News and Quinnipiac University poll of swing states (FL, OH, WI) was summarized as:

Roughly 6 in 10 likely voters in each state want Medicare to continue providing health insurance to older Americans the way it does today; fewer than a third of those polled said Medicare should be changed in the future to a system in which the government gives the elderly fixed amounts of money to buy health insurance or Medicare insurance, as Mr. Romney has proposed. And Medicare is widely seen as a good value: about three-quarters of the likely voters in each state said the benefits of Medicare are worth the cost to taxpayers.

But here's the question posed:

The federal government is spending money, in violation of the law, to lobby for higher taxes on soda, George Will reports:

Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School and an economic adviser to Mitt Romney, said the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, "gets paid nothing."

The comments, made in an interview with Reuters (link via Economic Policies for the 21st Century), run the risk of reinforcing the image promoted by the Obama campaign that Mr. Romney and his team as so wealthy as to be out of touch with the economic realities of mainstream Americans. Mr. Bernanke's salary for 2012 is $199,700, which is enough to put him in the top 5% of American income-earners.