Congressional Effect Fund manager Eric Singer writes in Investors Business Daily:

I heard a story a while ago about a woman who had been making $50,000 per year who was laid off.

After some months of casually searching for a full time job, she was offered one paying $40,000, but she refused it.

Her logic was, I am getting $20,000 per year from unemployment benefits, and I am collecting $18,000 per year from baby-sitting off-the-books three days a week, which, after accounting for my lower taxes, works out to almost the same for less work.

Those interested in this topic may wish to see also the earlier post here, Who Are the Unemployed?

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about $4 a gallon gasoline: "Politicians should neither panic nor pander."

The Wall Street Journal has a big story on wealthy people in mainland China thinking of moving to America or Europe. Says the article: "They are in search of things money can't buy in China: Cleaner air, safer food, better education for their children. Some also express concern about government corruption and the safety of their assets."

Lower down comes a reference to the source: a "survey by the state-run Bank of China and Hurun Report." More: "Most people cited their children's education as the main reason, followed by concerns over air quality, food safety and financial security." And, "Another survey last year, by management-consulting firm Bain & Co. and state-run China Merchants Bank, showed similar results."

You have to read pretty far down into the story to find one emigrant who says that in China, "The government has too much power."

Give the National Park Service some credit for a sign that tells the story of the creation of Muir Woods National Monument in a non-ideological way. It came as a surprise to me, even though I had visited the site at least once before. In case you can't make out the fine print or have your email set not to display the photographs, here's the text of the sign:

Saving Muir Woods:

Muir Woods National Monument was established in 1908 through the inspired leadership of William and Elizabeth Kent, Gifford Pinchot, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

William Kent was a prominent businessman, outdoorsman, and community leader who later served in Congress, where he sponsored legislation that created the National Park Service in 1916.

The California Academy of Sciences has a pretty cool four-story indoor rainforest, complete with birds, butterflies, and fish that delight both children and grownups. Alas, when you make your way up to the top, amid the butterflies is this ideologically freighted, and, so far as I can tell, inaccurate, sign. In case you can't make out the fine print in the photo or you have your email set to not open the photos in the email, here's the language: "Costa Rica: A model of rainforest care. Costa Rica is a conservation model. With growing human populations and impacts on tropical habitats, the best way to protect biodiversity is to establish preserves and manage them well. Costa Rica's long-term conservation efforts have resulted in nearly 24 percent of its land under protection (as compared to 16 percent for the U.S.)"

John Cochrane of the University of Chicago has a wonderful post up about the Federal Reserve, bank regulation, and mortgage modification:

The Fed was assigned great power after the financial crisis. It's more competent than most of the other agencies, and as a result of its historic independence can act with great power. But this situation cannot last. The Federal Reserve cannot command that one group of voters cough up $20,000 checks to another group of voters, and not expect those voters to want a say in the matter....our society is not built on faith in the wisdom of an unaccountable aristocracy with huge power and no supervision. That will be even more disastrous. That's where the Fed is going, and it cannot last.

A few points about the payroll tax extension, which the House and Senate both passed today after the Senate turned the House's two-page payroll tax extension into a 270-page Christmas tree monstrosity:

One of the little-noticed features of December's two-month extension of the payroll tax cut was a "recapture provision" that actually raised the income tax on those earning more that $110,100 a year. As an IRS press release explained it,

Under the terms negotiated by Congress, the law also includes a new "recapture" provision, which applies only to those employees who receive more than $18,350 in wages during the two-month period (the Social Security wage base for 2012 is $110,100, and $18,350 represents two months of the full-year amount). This provision imposes an additional income tax on these higher-income employees in an amount equal to 2 percent of the amount of wages they receive during the two-month period in excess of $18,350 (and not greater than $110,100).

This additional recapture tax is an add-on to income tax liability that the employee would otherwise pay for 2012 and is not subject to reduction by credits or deductions. The recapture tax would be payable in 2013 when the employee files his or her income tax return for the 2012 tax year.

Jesse Furman's nomination to a federal judgeship in the Southern District of New York is scheduled for a cloture vote on Friday, more than nine months after we posted about it here when President Obama nominated him. The letter of support from his Yale Law School classmates is worth clicking through to if you're interested in what Yale Law School graduates end up doing; Mr. Furman's class included James R. Copland, who is the director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Legal Policy, and also Mark Gerson.

So the chief of the California Public Employees Retirement System, Joe Dear, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, said private equity managers "risk becoming the robber barons of the 21st century" if they don't support President Obama's desire to more than double the taxes they pay on "carried interest."

"Robber barons"?

First, no one is forcing Calpers to invest the 15% of its portfolio that it does in private equity.

Second, if anyone in the country is in a position to appreciate the virtue of capital gains treatment for long-term capital gains of both founder's stock of entrepreneurs and the carried interest of venture capital managers (a form of private equity), you'd think it would be California, home to Silicon Valley, Facebook, and Google, and all the jobs and state and local tax revenue they create.

ObamaCare's individual mandate to purchase health insurance has gotten plenty of attention. But it's the law's second mandate — a provision that forces the states to spend more on Medicaid — that is the subject of libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week: "The trillion-dollar question is whether the federal government can commandeer state revenues."

The soaring stock prices of health insurance companies are the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason.com (here) or the New York Sun (here.)

Reuters reported late Friday, citing two anonymous sources, that President Obama will call for reducing the U.S. corporate income tax rate to "the high 20 percent range" from 35%.

George Washington University's Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Harvard's Claudia Goldin have a new working paper out from the National Bureau of Economic Research under the title "Does Federal Student Aid Raise Tuition? New Evidence on For-Profit Colleges." Contrary to the usual rules at newspapers, the reason the headline is phrased as a question isn't because the answer is "no." From the abstract:

Many for-profit institutions that are not Title IV eligible offer programs and certificates that are similar, if not identical, to those given by institutions that are part of Title IV. We find that the Title IV institutions charge tuition that is about 75 percent higher than that charged by comparable institutions whose students cannot apply for federal financial aid. The dollar value of the premium is about equal to the amount of financial aid received by students in eligible institutions, lending credence to the "Bennett hypothesis" that aid-eligible institutions raise tuition to maximize aid.

MIT's Technology Review has a report on distress at electric car company Fisker and battery maker A123 systems:

Fisker Automotive received a [federal Department of Energy] loan guarantee for $528.7 million, of which it has received $193 million so far. A123 Systems, a young company that was started with the help of government funds, was recently awarded a $249 million federal grant to build battery factories.

On October 27, 2009, Vice President Biden announced that Fisker would re-open a former GM plant in Delaware to build electric cars: