One of the more interesting lines in President Obama's State of the Union was this: "when students aren't allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen."

I thought the president was lifting an idea from a friend of mine who is a Boston City Councilor who has been pushing this idea in Massachusetts. Connecticut is reportedly going to 18 as the dropout age in the 2013-2014 school year, while New Hampshire's change to 18 from 16 went into effect in the 2009-10 school year. Students are starting school older these days, so the change doesn't necessarily mean those who drop out will be actually getting more years of education.

President Obama's State of the Union speech was in some ways typical of him — in rhetoric and sometimes in substance appearing centrist and unifying, but in other ways divisive and statist.

First the centrist stuff. Perhaps the most memorable passage of the speech was this laugh line: "I've ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don't make sense…We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill – because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk. I'm confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder."

The speech began and ended with praise of American soldiers: "When you put on that uniform, it doesn't matter if you're black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight."

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's tax returns have prompted a new wave of press attention to the tax treatment of private equity managers and of other investment partnerships. There are few other issues about which there is so much misinformation afoot. Here is an attempt to correct some of the myths.

Myth No. 1.: This is an issue about the treatment of the little guy versus billionaires. Not so. Those pressing this issue include Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Bloomberg, all of whom are a lot richer than Mitt Romney. It's a case of some billionaires wanting to raise taxes, not on themselves, but on other billionaires and multi-centimillionaires who compete with them for deals, for investment capital, for talent, and in the contest of wealth accumulation.

That's the headline over a very well done Bret Stephens column in the Wall Street Journal: "Thus the core difference between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama: For the governor, the convictions are the veneer. For the president, the pragmatism is. Voters always see through this. They usually prefer the man who stands for something." Ouch! Then this, on how to survive a second Obama term: "Hope ObamaCare is repealed by the High Court, the Iranian bomb is repealed by the Israeli Air Force, and the Senate switches hands, giving America a healthy spell of Hippocratic government."

Tonight's Republican presidential debate was pretty lame. Instead of a debate, it was more of a group interview, with the candidates taking turns answering different questions posed by NBC's Brian Williams and, briefly, two assistants — an editor named Adam Smith from a Florida newspaper and Beth Reinhard of National Journal. Ms. Reinhard at one point asked, apparently seriously, "Why didn't the Bush tax cuts work?" Newt Gingrich answered that the country would have been in much worse shape without them, which is true, but which also failed to adequately capture the growth they unleashed.

The liveliest exchange of the debate was when Mitt Romney tore into Mr. Gingrich, describing him as "an influence peddler in Washington" who "had to resign in disgrace from his job as speaker." Mr. Gingrich tried to avoid responding directly, but finally said to Mr. Romney, "you've been walking around this state saying things that are untrue."

By the time the debate ended, I liked Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich both less than I did going in, which was probably just what NBC wanted.

Mitt Romney's criticism of President Obama for supposedly cutting $500 billion from Medicare is the subject of my column this week. "Just to be precise, far from cutting $500 billion from Medicare, President Obama has, in a mere three years, managed to increase Medicare spending to $494 billion in 2011 from $391 billion in 2008. That is an increase of $103 billion, or 26% in three years." Please check it out at Reason.com (here) or at the New York Sun (here).

KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, has a piece up at the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus site reporting that the University of Iowa's history department "had 22 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans," while Duke University's "had 32 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans."

From a New Yorker piece about White House memos annotated by President Obama:

At the end of another memo about fiscal discipline after the summit, he asked his staff to seek out ideas from one of the most conservative members in the House. "Have we looked at any of the other GOP recommendations (e.g. Paul Ryan's) to see if any make sense?" he wrote.

Obama could be unsentimental toward liberal piety. In May, 2009, his advisers informed him that his budget for global health assistance, much of which goes to combat H.I.V., would increase by a hundred and sixty-five million dollars yet would still face "opposition from the very vocal HIV/AIDS activist community." He wrote back, "How can they complain when we are increasing funding?" At the end, he added, "In announcing this, we should be very complimentary of the Bush Administration."

A professor at Arizona State University, Chris Herbst, and at Georgia State University, Erdal Tekin, are out with a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research taking a look at what they say are the effects of government subsidies of child care. From the paper:

Our findings consistently show that child care subsidies are associated with reductions in maternal physical and mental health and poorer interactions between parents and children. For example, subsidy receipt lowers the likelihood that a mother reports being in "very good" or "excellent" health and increases the likelihood of showing symptoms consistent with anxiety, depression, and parenting stress. Subsidized mothers also reveal more psychological and physical aggression toward their children, and are more likely to utilize spanking as a disciplinary tool.

About $9.1 billion in federal and state funds were spent on such subsidies in 2009, the authors report. An abstract of the paper is here.

One of the many valuable services provided by FutureOfCapitalism.com is keeping track of the tax increases supported by the New York Times. An editorial in today's Times comes out for an increase in corporate taxes, which are already among the world's highest. Says the Times, commenting on a report by the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness: "All of this would require more tax revenue, but the report discusses corporate tax reform that would not raise more money and would make it easier for American multinational corporations to avoid United States tax on foreign profits. ... At a time when austerity is in vogue, it is also morally indefensible to not ask for more from corporations." This is, by my count, at least the 17th tax increase supported by the Times in recent years.

As a reminder, here are the previous sixteen on the list:

James Grant, whose book Mr. Speaker! was reviewed here last year, has a piece in the Washington Post about how President Warren Harding ended a recession "by raising interest rates, reducing the public debt and balancing the federal budget."

Newt Gingrich's victory speech in South Carolina denounced "the elites in Washington and New York" and "what the elites think in New York and Washington." Later he faulted President Obama for blocking the Keystone XL pipeline to please "his extremist left wing friends in San Francisco." He also faulted what he called the "growing anti-religious bigotry of our elites."

The arrogance of the elites is a theme that we've covered extensively here at FutureOfCapitalism.com; see, for example, the posts here, here, here, and here.

The Fall/Winter issue of Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, carries an article praising the Soviet Union for its nature reserves:

for Americans thoroughly schooled in anticommunism, the zapovednik system would seem merely typical of the autocratic deeply repressive regime. In fact, however, the concept of creating vast, undisturbed, strictly protected reserves arose toward the end of the czarist era. It was based on concepts of biological conservation that were ahead of their time; and, from the perspective of a 21st-century world still struggling to strike a workable balance between protecting the natural world and meeting the needs and desires of a still-increasing and ever-more-prosperous human population, it deserves a measure of understanding and respect....

Robert Samuelson has a Washington Post column describing President Obama's rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline as "an act of national insanity." He writes: "Stopping the pipeline won't halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global-warming emissions. Indeed, Obama's decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills."

Michael Kinsley has a deft takedown of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman:

Another reason I remain worried about inflation is that for two years I have been waiting for Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize- winning New York Times columnist, to tell us when we should reverse course. ...When the economy is robust again, it will be time to start paying down the debt.