The House Majority leader, Eric Cantor, has posted the text of his remarks today at Washington and Lee University:

We don't need a Buffet Rule. We need a Buffer Rule. A buffer is a shield to protect against the harm and hostility of an intrusive government...

The president says that he has to tax the biggest generators of growth in our economy because of what he calls "basic math" – the need for government to spend more and supposedly pay down the debt. However, the president's math is a math of division – dividing the country into a war between rich and poor. Countries that play this game end up losing their economic prosperity, losing their freedom and losing their honor.

In contrast, my vision – the Republican vision – is a math of multiplication: multiplying job creation, innovation and experimentation by multiplying the money and power given back to hard-working individuals and taken away from bureaucrats. This will lead to job and business formation by small businesses, entrepreneurs and investors.

Secretary of State Clinton has established something called the "International Council on Women's Business," and named the CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, as its vice chair. At the council's first meeting on January 24, 2012, Secretary Clinton said of Ms. Nooyi, "her leadership at PepsiCo is a model for entrepreneurs and executives around the world."

Now the Wall Street Journal reports, "PepsiCo Inc. is chopping 8,700 jobs...about 3% of PepsiCo's global work force...PepsiCo's share price is down 1.5% since Mrs. Nooyi became CEO in 2006, during which time Coke's share price has soared 52%."

No mention in the Journal article of Secretary Clinton's praise for Ms. Nooyi, or of Ms. Nooyi's role on this International Council on Women's Business.

Our original post linking the Greek fiscal crisis to the Olympics was published here back on February 16, 2010. Now Steven Rattner writes in the Financial Times: "It was no secret that Greece's debt was exploding as it doubled government wages, vastly expanded public job rolls and even spent $14bn on the 2004 Olympics, more than twice the budget."

Daniel Mitchell has a post about a new World Bank report that says, "There are good reasons to suspect that big government is bad for growth...big governments are a drag on growth."

Fortune has an advance excerpt of Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter. Mr. Buffett makes some interesting points about the dollar:

Even in the U.S., where the wish for a stable currency is strong, the dollar has fallen a staggering 86% in value since 1965, when I took over management of Berkshire. It takes no less than $7 today to buy what $1 did at that time. Consequently, a tax-free institution would have needed 4.3% interest annually from bond investments over that period to simply maintain its purchasing power. Its managers would have been kidding themselves if they thought of any portion of that interest as "income."

An op-ed in today's New York Times proposes a "Zuckerberg Tax":

For individuals and married couples who earn, say, more than $2.2 million in income, or own $5.7 million or more in publicly traded securities (representing the top 0.1 percent of families), the appreciation in their publicly traded stock and securities would be "marked to market" and taxed annually as if they had sold their positions at year's end, regardless of whether the securities were actually sold. The tax could be imposed at long-term capital gains rates so tax rates would stay as they were....Only publicly traded stock would be marked to market.

The writer, David Miller, is a tax lawyer, which means he makes his money by having a complex tax code. It seems to me that some of Richard Epstein's criticisms of a wealth tax would also apply here. A few other points:

It's a big day for revolving-door news. First this, and now the New York Times reports that the chief of the securities fraud unit for the United States attorney's office in Manhattan, Christopher Garcia, is leaving to become a $1.2 million-a-year white collar defense lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. From the Times:

The well-worn path from the federal prosecutor's office in Manhattan to practicing white-collar defense at a corporate law firm has been an especially busy one lately. Boyd M. Johnson III, a former deputy United States attorney in Manhattan, recently joined WilmerHale, and Jonathan R. Streeter, the lead prosecutor in the case against Mr. Rajaratnam, has departed for Dechert.

The Albany Times Union has a sympathetic report on a Papa John's pizza franchisee who was fined $5,500 by the state of New York for "failing to provide enough polo shirts to employees in his pizza shops." From the paper:

Late last year, staff from the state Department of Labor came in for a multi-day audit of his pizza business. They spent a few days going through files, pay records and other data and gave him their seal of approval.

"We were actually lauded for how good our records are," said King.

But then the inspector had some bad news: King wasn't providing enough golf shirts to employees.

If they work five days a week, for example, employees are supposed to get five shirts — even if they work just a few hours per day.

The owner facing the fine says he was told "an appeal would take years due to the backlog and the fine would accrue with interest."

A post here on February 3 praised Spirit Airlines for its public campaign against a costly new Department of Transportation regulation. I said then, "Give Spirit credit for fighting back in public rather than just hiring some former DOT official or former colleague of a current DOT official to lobby in private to overturn the rule, imposing yet more costs that wind up getting passed along to consumers or shareholders."

One journalist who looks prophetic following Rick Santorum's wins yesterday in Republican presidential contests in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota is the editor of the Weekly Standard, William Kristol, who wrote this on February 1:

What if Santorum does as well or better than Gingrich in the Nevada caucuses Saturday, or in the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses next Tuesday? What if Santorum is competitive with Romney in the Missouri beauty contest primary next Tuesday, where Gingrich isn't on the ballot? Couldn't non-Romney voters begin to move nationally from Gingrich to Santorum? Couldn't populist and Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin do so as well?

In the Gallup tracking poll today, Gingrich is at 28 percent, Romney at 27, and Santorum at 17. Romney will surely move up several points over the next few days--but couldn't Gingrich fall enough and Santorum rise enough that Santorum's number approaches or passes Gingrich? Couldn't Santorum move into second place?

My usual early warning system for books about the dollar consists of the New York Sun and the Wall Street Journal. This time, though, it's, of all places, National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" that has the scoop on a new book, Paper Promises: Debt, Money, and the New World Order, by Philip Coggan, who is the "Buttonwood" columnist of the Economist. The NPR article begins:

Financial writer Philip Coggan traces the current global financial crisis to the 1970s, when the U.S. went off the gold standard.

"Up till then, every form of money had some link to precious metal: gold or silver," Coggan, author of a new book, Paper Promises: Debt, Money and the New World Order, tells Morning Edition's Renee Montagne.

Here's an interesting piece about what the author calls "The Forgotten 33%" — not the 1% superrich, not the 20% government workers, and not the 46% who owe zero income tax. Read the comments, too, though. The author's a little harsher on Wall Street than I'd be, and in general I'm for thinking about Americans all together rather than dividing us up into parts. But as long as people are talking about percentages, this is another way to look at it.

The New York Times does an excellent job breaking the story of more than $200,000 in money raised for the Obama campaign by the brothers of a fugitive Mexican casino owner, and the story gets lead billing on the front page of today's Times. The Times article doesn't say how the paper got the story. I wonder if it was a tip from Carlos Slim. It will be interesting to see if this article generates the sort of follow-up it merits from the rest of the press herd and from the Times itself, or if the Obama campaign's decision to return the money will make it a one-day story.

A warm welcome to the newly launched Washington Free Beacon. Editor Matthew Continetti explains what the new site is up to in an article that appears under the headline Combat Journalism.

Speaking of food regulation, here's an example of a private company voluntarily making changes to its products rather than being forced to do so by the coercion of the government. Reuters reports:

Walmart's efforts also include lowering the amount of sodium and added sugars in some of its food. The company said it cut 15 percent of the sodium in Great Value ketchup, an average of 15 percent of the sodium in Great Value canned vegetables such as corn, green beans and carrots, and more than 70 percent of the sodium in fresh steaks, roasts and certain other cuts of beef.

The company is also putting a "great for you" label on food it says is healthy, an approach that is different from the government-mandated nutrition labels.