President Obama's latest economic policy talking point is that Republicans want to fire teachers, police officers and firefighters. My latest weekly column takes a look at that claim, and at how Mr. Obama makes it: "I can't recall ever encountering another politician who so sanctimoniously preens about being above politics while so crassly engaging in vote-buying with taxpayer money." Please check it out at Reason.com here.

The "rational basis" test that the Supreme Court uses to review actions of state and local governments that aren't subject to closer scrutiny is flawed and should be scrapped, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes in his latest weekly column, which is up at the Hoover Institution web site. "The Court should restore some semblance of true rationality to American constitutional law by junking the rational basis test that leads it to disregard every known principle of justice and efficiency," he writes. What set Professor Epstein off was the high court's 6-3 decision in Amour v. Indianapolis. (The three dissenters were Roberts, Scalia, and Alito.)

From a New York Times news article about a new demographic survey of Jews in New York:

Those findings, contained in the first authoritative study of the city's Jewish population in nearly a decade, challenges the entrenched image of Jews as liberal, affluent and well educated. Over the last decade wealthy, Ivy League graduates like those on the Upper West Side have increasingly lost population share relative to Orthodox groups, like the Hasidic population in Brooklyn, where college degrees are rare and poverty rates have reached 43 percent.

Let us count the problems with these two sentences.

1. Basic subject-verb agreement. It should be "this finding...challenges" or "those findings...challenge," not, as the Times has it "Those findings...challenges."

The chairman and CEO of Travelers Cos., the insurer, Jay Fishman, has an op-ed piece in Bloomberg View asserting, "New small businesses, and the U.S. economy, would benefit significantly from a three-year incubation period during which they would face lower taxes, fewer regulatory requirements and fewer penalties for first-time and harmless paperwork violations."

The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza has a piece looking at what President Obama would do in a second term. He writes: "Obama won in 2008 by seven points. If he manages to win this year, it is likely to be by less than that, which would make him the first President in a hundred and twenty-four years to win a second term by a smaller margin than in his initial election. Whatever a mandate is, Obama won't have one."

Not that that would stop him. Among the possible second term initiatives the article discusses are immigration reform, tax increases, an effort to combat climate change, nuclear arms reduction, "a renewed push for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians," and:

From the May 17, 2001, issue of Smartertimes.com, a daily critique of the New York Times that was published between 2000 and 2002:

Sin of Omission: A flattering profile in the House and Home section of today's New York Times describes Harding and Mary Lawrence and a house they owned in the South of France. Given that the article goes on at such length and makes reference to "the Lawrences' spirit, a combination of American energy and European refinement," you would think the Times might have found room to mention the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence have formally renounced their American citizenship.

WNYC has a fascinating dispatch on the black market that exists for food-truck permits in New York City:

There are only 3,000 citywide, two-year permits, and there are so many names on the wait list (more than 2,000) that the Department of Health hasn't taken names since 2007....

Where red-brick residential Brooklyn gives way to a grittier industrial neighborhood, there's an unmarked asphalt lot where permits can easily be bought and sold.

This is a commissary, a one-stop shop where food truck entrepreneurs can get everything they need: purchase a vehicle, order meat and vegetables -- and secure a permit too.

On a recent visit to the lot, WNYC asked about buying a permit. A worker took the reporter into a store room full of jars of mayonnaise and pickles, and dialed a number on a cell phone and handed the phone to the reporter.

The man on the other end of the line, who called himself Mohammed, said he could obtain a second-hand permit in a few days, and it would cost $18,000.

The Wall Street Journal publishes op-ed piece by the CEO of a company complaining about Google and asking the government to force Google to "allow users to reduce the number of ads shown."

I'd like my Wall Street Journal tomorrow with no ads shown, thank you, and I'd like the government to force the Journal to provide the newspaper to me that way.

The argument is obviously absurd when applied to the Wall Street Journal, but the Journal seems to consider it worthy of publication when it is applied to Google.

One of the ways the left has been explaining Scott Walker's victory in the Wisconsin recall election is by claiming that Walker outspent his opponent by a 7 to one margin. Hot Air does a helpful job of debunking that claim, pointing to a Washington Post graphic that covers spending through May 21 and says that pro-Republican groups spent $16.3 million on the election while pro-Democratic groups spent $17.9 million.

That doesn't cover spending by the candidates themselves, where Governor Walker had a significant edge, but it does tend to undercut the contention that the independent spending supposedly unleashed by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision was the deciding factor in the Republicans' favor in the race.

"You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!"

— The Eagles, "Hotel California"

"WASHINGTON—The Treasury Department issued new rules making it harder for U.S. companies to move to low-tax countries..."

—The Wall Street Journal, news article, "Treasury Toughens Rules for Firms to Move to Low-Tax Nations"

The Journal reports that "The new rules make it tougher for many U.S. companies to relocate to low-tax countries through merger by requiring the combined firms to have 25% of employees, property and gross income in the new home country. If firms don't meet these requirements, they face substantial tax penalties. The previous rules required substantial business activity in the new home country, a fuzzier standard."

The Economist has a long article on efforts to curb the charitable tax deduction:

There was little opposition in America when in 1917, four years after the federal government gained the constitutional right to levy an income tax, American taxpayers were allowed to deduct charitable donations from their taxable income (again, extending precedent established in the 19th century). A year later, Americans were granted, at death, unlimited deductions for their charitable bequests from the new estate tax.

Some economists say this can be justified on the basis that taxable income should include only personal consumption and wealth creation, and money given to charity is arguably neither. This was the implicit logic behind the development of deductible donations in Britain in the 1920s, when donors began to covenant part of their income to charities, and thereby avoid paying tax on it.

Slate has an article about how the medallion system that limits the number of taxis in New York is good for medallion owners, but bad for passengers.

A Bloomberg View editorial bizarrely declares that among the losers in the Wisconsin recall election was "the spirit of democracy." Quite to the contrary, Governor Walker's victory shows that politics and democracy can do important things and, specifically, that democratic government can be financially responsible. That's a big, positive development for democracy and for America.

Bloomberg News has a news article about the House of Representatives blocking the energy department from enforcing a ban on 100-watt light-bulbs:

Blocking the Energy Department from enforcement might let unscrupulous foreign manufacturers push non-compliant products, including to bulk buyers such as builders. Those sales are difficult to track.

"Some in Congress are willing to put U.S. jobs at risk for political positioning," said Joseph Higbee, a spokesman for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, a Rosslyn, Virginia-based group. "This is an example of a few politicizing light bulbs at the risk of American workers and the economy."

Bloomberg seems to think that only foreign manufacturers lack scruples. What scruples were being demonstrated when the American manufacturers of the fancy expensive lighbulbs went to Congress in the first place to ban their low-cost foreign competition?

It's not entirely clear if the problem was the exit polls or the New York Times, but either way readers of the New York Times Web site got a pretty distorted view of reality in the real-time coverage of the Wisconsin recall election. At 9:39 p.m. the Times reported, "The extremely close race between Scott Walker and Tom Barrett has raised the prospect that a recount might be requested to determine the winner." At 9 p.m. the Times reported, under the headline, "Exit Polls Show Extremely Close Race as Voting Ends":

The polls have closed in Wisconsin, where early exit poll returns show a very tight race between Scott Walker, the embattled Republican governor, and his Democratic challenger, Tom Barrett.

Labor unions, which had pushed to recall Mr. Walker in the wake of his efforts to curtail collective bargaining rights for state workers, appear to have succeeded in bolstering turnout among union households.