Impressions from tonight's debate:

Newt Gingrich dealt with his ex-wife's claim that he asked for an "open marriage" by sharply attacking CNN's John King for asking about it. "The story is false," he said, denouncing it as "trash" and saying, "I'm tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans." It was the most animated Mr. Gingrich got all night. The problem for Mr. Gingrich is that he's not running for president against CNN's John King, he's running against President Obama and the other three Republicans on the stage, none of whom was offering him a lot of support on the issue. Ron Paul made reference to his "wife of 54 years," while Mitt Romney made reference to his "wife of 42 years" and Rick Santorum said, "These are issues of character for each of us to consider."

"Stocks Are Still Expensive" was the headline over a New York Times item posted August 4, 2011 by David Leonhardt. It began "The main problem for the stock market is obviously the economy. But it's not the only problem. Stocks are also under pressure because they are fairly expensive right now relative to earnings." It went on, "stocks would have to fall another 6 percent from their current level to return to the 50-year average." The Times at one point that day was linking the item from its home page, and Mr. Leonhardt has since been promoted to Washington bureau chief.

Over at Reason, Damon Root has an interesting post arguing that the post-Civil War 14th Amendment contains within it a protection of economic liberty that should allow the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a Florida law requiring interior designers to be licensed by the state.

The report that President Obama is weighing appointing either Lawrence Summers or Hillary Clinton to be president of the World Bank is quite a story, if true. My bet is that if Mrs. Clinton wants the job, she could get it over Professor Summers. Like Professor Summers' previous Obama administration position as chairman of the National Economic Council, the World Bank job doesn't require Senate confirmation, which makes the path easier for Professor Summers. Not that he's unconfirmable, just that it might be something of a circus. Which of them would be better at it, and whether there's still a need for a World Bank at all, are different questions.

The Washington Examiner's Michael Barone notices Mitt Romney "characterizing his income from speeches as 'not very much' when, according to disclosures he has made, it was $374,328 between February 2010 and February 2011."

Time.com has published an article I wrote based on an interview with the 24-year-old, Jewish founder of Tebowing.com, a popular Web site inspired by the praying quarterback of the Denver Broncos of the National Football League. A capitalist success story in action: please check it out here.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column, rebutting a Stanford economist's proposal for a wealth tax that was aired on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, is up at the Hoover Institution Web site. My favorite part of it is the link to the IRS's Form 706 and instructions, which total 43 pages and are mind-boggling in their complexity: "Anyone who looks over the estate tax forms might gain some sense of why I began my academic career as a tax specialist, but have developed a fierce and abiding distaste for the entire estate tax venture."

From a New York Times news article today:

Some economists say the cuts are necessary to keep capital from fleeing the United States to lower-tax countries. Scott A. Hodge, president of the conservative Tax Foundation, has written extensively that a capital gains tax is effectively double taxation on profits that have already been taxed at the corporate level. Many investors, and political leaders in both parties, have lobbied for tax cuts on capital gains and dividends by arguing that they spur investment and, therefore, job creation.

But there is little data to support that contention: the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service issued a report last year concluding that tax cuts on capital gains reduce federal revenues and do little to stimulate economic growth. And as income inequality and tax fairness have become major concerns for many Americans, the issue of tax fairness has brought calls to alter the tax code's preferential treatment of investment income.

Clive Crook, writing in Bloomberg View:

Another drawback of quantitative easing and other unorthodox interventions in financial markets is that they are fiscal as much as monetary operations. They transfer real resources. They expose taxpayers to risk, and involve implicit subsidies on a potentially enormous scale. How to allocate the costs and benefits of these operations across the economy is, or ought to be, a political question -- as political, say, as the design of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. In this setting, the usual case for central-bank independence loses all force.

The editor of the Money & Investing section of the Wall Street Journal, Francesco Guerrera, has a column out calling for increased taxes:

It is difficult to defend the fact that private-equity and hedge-fund executives pay no more than 15% on their share of their partnership's profits because it is considered a capital gain.

If it looks like income and smells like income, it should be taxed like income—at much higher rates.

For an alternative view, see my 2010 Washington Examiner column on the topic.

It's bad enough President Obama and some congressional Democrats are calling for increasing taxes on carried interest; now a news editor at Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is joining in?

While Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are going around saying America can't afford to try Newt Gingrich's suggestion of a defined-contribution style pension system as part of Social Security, here in New York a Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, just proposed such a plan for new state employees. Writes the Manhattan Institute's E.J. McMahon: "it's a very big deal that Cuomo has put the DC concept on the table."

The similarities between John Hancock and Mitt Romney, the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the 70th, is the topic of my weekly column this week. Please check it out at Reason.com (here) or at the New York Sun (here).

Mitt Romney said he would not release his tax returns until April, and left himself wiggle room even on that answer, in response to a demand by Governor Perry of Texas that "we need to know now."

Mr. Romney said he believes people who commit violent crimes should permanently lose their right to vote even if they serve their time and successfully re-enter society.

Mr. Romney also said he would have signed a military appropriations bill that denies a habeas corpus right to American citizens. "People who join Al Qaeda are not entitled to the rights of due process," Mr. Romney said, leaving unanswered how exactly, other than due process, the government was to determine who had joined Al Qaeda. Nor did Mr. Romney explain how he planned, if elected, to swear an oath to "preserve, protect and defend" the Constitution, which includes the Fifth Amendment, and have it be consistent with that position on due process. He said he didn't think President Obama would abuse the power to detain citizens and that he didn't plan to abuse it, either.

The inaugural FutureOfCapitalism.com Journalism Award goes to Milt Freudenheim and the New York Times, for its story on electronic medical records company Epic Systems, which appeared about 26 months after we wrote about about the company here, explained why the rest of the press had missed the story, and offered the award to the first news organization to tell the Epic story to a wider audience.

The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and the Hill all have coverage of negotiations between Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, and Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat who is running against Mr. Brown for Senate, and their staffs on an "enforceable" agreement to ban negative television, radio, and online advertisements by outside groups in the Senate race.