"Obama Pro-Business Regulation Push Reaps No Political Dividends," is the headline over a Bloomberg News article. The article concludes:

The partisan environment in Washington means that it will be tough for Obama's regulatory slowdown to pay political dividends, Conrad said.

"There are some people for whom nothing they do will be enough," he said.

The point seems to be that if it weren't for partisanship, everyone would recognize that what President Obama has really been up to on the regulation front is looking out for business, and would give him the political credit for it. As the rest of the Bloomberg article points out, this is not exactly a widely held view, or even one much supported by the record.

The Republican Study Committee, a group of conservatives in the House of Representatives, is out with a report on all the tax increases scheduled to go into effect in 2013 if Congress does not take action.

Among them:

The one-year employee-share payroll tax cut of 2% will expire.

The marginal income tax rates will increase as follows:

• 35% bracket will increase to 39.6%
• 33% bracket will increase to 36%
• 28% bracket will increase to 31%
• 25% bracket will increase to 28%
• 10% and 15% brackets will condense to 15%

The standard deduction for couples as a percentage of the standard deduction for singles will decrease to 167% from 200%, restoring the marriage penalty.

The personal capital gains tax will increase to 20% and 10% (from 15% and 5%)

Dividends will no longer be taxed at the capital gains rate for individuals.

David Frum has a column explaining how President Obama managed to insult Poland while honoring Jan Karski with the Medal of Freedom.

The medal to Karski was to be part of the process of laying painful memories to rest. It was intended too to strengthen the US-Polish relations that the Obama administration has frayed in pursuit of its "reset" with Russia. Instead, this administration bungled everything: past, present, and future.

Another star turn by the man historian Michael Beschloss called "probably the smartest guy ever to become president." (Beschloss is quoted in R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s new book The Death of Liberalism.)

The United States has more in common with the European Union than we might like to think, libertarian law professor Richard Epstein writes in his weekly column. He mentions the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937:

Once prices are stabilized for the exclusive benefit of farmers, the inherent risk of variable agricultural prices (often controlled by the weather) is not magically removed. Rather, it is transferred by government fiat to the rest of society that bears the burden either in the form of higher taxes or higher prices.

The United Fruit Company and one of its leading figures, Samuel Zemurray, is the subject of my column this week, inspired by Rich Cohen's new book, The Fish That Ate The Whale: The Life And Times Of America's Banana King. Please read it at Time.com (here), Reason.com (here), and the New York Sun (here).

Morgan Stanley and Facebook are both being criticized for their handling of the Facebook initial public offering. From a Wall Street Journal editorial:

Morgan Stanley is also getting deserved criticism for the way it handled retail investors not on its client lists. The bank allocated about 25% of the IPO, an unusually high percentage, to retail even as its analysts were warning big institutional clients about their concerns with the stock. Some of those retail investors bought the stock during its early price run-up and have since suffered losses. The obligatory Congressional outrage and SEC investigation are now underway.

The Wall Street Journal accurately observes in an editorial headlined "Targeting John Roberts" that what the Journal calls "the elite liberal press" is preparing for the Supreme Court's ObamaCare ruling with articles warning the justices that if they strike the health care law they will be attacked as politically motivated partisans.

Alas the Journal does not provide any examples. Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein helps out on that front with a detailed critique of Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker article about the Citizens United case.

This story about how Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senate candidate in Massachusetts, handled her supposed Native American identity isn't going away. The Boston Globe has another long article about it today:

...for at least six straight years during Warren's tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves.

In addition, both Harvard's guidelines and federal regulations for the statistics lay out a specific definition of Native American that Warren does not meet.

My Monday column about the similarity between German exit-tax policy Senator Schumer and Speaker Boehner's attempt to tax Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, who renounced his American citizenship and left the country, seems to have drawn Mr. Schumer's ire. The Los Angeles Times (here) and the Huffiington Post (here) have reports about Mr. Schumer's speech on the Senate floor on the topic: "I know a thing or two about what the Nazis did. Some of my relatives were killed by them."

The Associated Press has a dispatch from London reporting that Britain's National Health Service, which now covers up to three cycles of in-vitro fertilization for women under 40, may extend that coverage to women up to 42 years old, same-sex couples, and women facing fertility-reducing cancer treatments. What a contrast to the approach of President Obama, who wants to mandate free contraception, but whose ObamaCare makes no requirement of coverage for even a single IVF cycle, let alone three of them. I come at this from a free-market perspective that says the government should not mandate any of this, but aside from that, it is striking that America can have an immigration policy that restricts our population, a health care policy that mandates free contraception but not in-vitro fertilization, and then find it mysterious that there are not enough younger workers to sustain the Social Security and Medicare programs for the elderly.

Thomas Sowell has a column about Andrew Mellon's book Taxation: The People's Business, recently reprinted by the University of Minnesota. The Mellon tax cuts inspired the Kennedy tax cuts, which inspired the Reagan tax cuts. Mr. Sowell writes, "After Mellon finally succeeded in getting Congress to lower the top tax rate from 73 percent to 24 percent, the government actually received more tax revenues at the lower rate than it had at the higher rate."

Growing tomatoes in the front yard of your own property in Newton, Massachusetts, is illegal, at least the way Eli Katzoff is doing it, according to this Boston Globe article, which says city officials are trying to shut down the gardener.

Senator Schumer's proposed exit tax on Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, along with Speaker Boehner's position on it and the parallels to the German Reichsfluchsteuer, are the subjects of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), or Newsmax (here).

When the Obama administration, back in March, slapped tariffs on Chinese solar panels, I wrote about it here. Now the Obama administration has reportedly imposed even larger tariffs, as much as 250%. The same observation applies: "If the American government is worried about Chinese government-backed companies undercutting American companies in manufacturing, taxing American consumers seems like a bit of a self-defeating way of approaching the problem. An alternative approach might be to to support free labor unions in China and political change there that would reduce government involvement in the economy."

For an amazing example of how hard it is to kill a federal program, take a look at today's New York Times article on the Federal Helium Reserve. The Times article doesn't really frame it this way, but the story is essentially this: In 1925, Congress created a federal helium program to make sure that what was then called the Department of War had enough helium to fill the blimps and dirigibles that it used at the time. In 1996, the Gingrich-led Congress, observing that blimps and dirigibles had been surpassed by satellites, drones, and stealth bombers, voted to get the federal government out of the helium business.