Predictions for the year ahead, multiple-choice style the way William Safire used to do it, are the stuff of my weekly column this week. Please have a look at Reason.com (here) or the New York Sun (here).

Bloomberg News has a dispatch on the surge in intercity bus operators like Megabus.com and BoltBus. Left unexplored are two policy angles: first, how inconvenient and intrusive federally mandated airport security procedures, which don't apply to bus travel, have helped to make buses a more attractive option than flying for some trips. And second, how the market is meeting the same need for intercity transportation that President Obama wants to address by spending $53 billion in taxpayer dollars on high speed rail. What a contrast between the efficiency of an entrepreneurial, market-driven, dynamic approach and the cost of a government-driven, central planning approach.

A professor of economics at MIT, David Autor, has a new working paper out from the National Bureau of Economic Research under the title, "The Unsustainable Rise of the Disability Rolls in the United States: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Options." An abstract is here and a free download of a similar or identical MIT working paper from last month is here. From the paper:

Between 1989 and 2009, the share of adults receiving SSDI benefits doubled, from 2.3 to 4.6 percent of Americans ages 25-64. In the same interval, cash payments to SSDI recipients (adjusted for inflation) tripled to $121 billion, and Medicare expenditures for SSDI recipients rose from $18 billion to $69 billion.

Has the number of disabled Americans really doubled in the past 20 years and has it really gotten three times as expensive to take care of them? The answer to the first part of that question is probably not: "there is little evidence that the underlying health of the working-age population in the U.S. is deteriorating."

The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate and former governor of Massachusetts. Says Mr. Romney:

"We have a choice in America to be remaining a merit-based opportunity society that follows the Constitution, or to follow the path of Europe. And I'm the guy who believes in the former. I believe America got it right. I believe Europe got it wrong. I believe America must remain the leader of the world. . . . I am absolutely committed to an American century. I see this as an American century."

Kroger and Walgreen followed Walmart and Supervalu in removing Enfamil Newborn baby formula from store shelves, Bloomberg News reports, adding, "Officials screening samples of the formula and water used to prepare it said results may not come until next week....If bacteria are conclusively found in unopened formula, a formal recall could follow, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said."

The left-wing caricature of greedy businessmen feeding dangerous products to consumers until government regulators tell them to stop has in this case been turned on its head. Instead, the businesses are taking the product off market on their own initiative, before the FDA has even decided the product is at fault, let alone issued a "formal recall." Sometimes self-regulation works, in part because it is in the business's own self-interest not to risk poisoning its own customers, in part because individual businesses can sometimes move faster than a government bureaucracy.

You can hardly open a Web site or watch a television show these days without stumbling over some warm and fuzzy image commercial from GE Capital. And GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, recall, is the chairman of President Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. So it's interesting to see the Securities and Exchange Commission choose the Friday before Christmas to issue news of a $70.35 million settlement in a civil case in which, the SEC press release says, the SEC "charged GE Funding Capital Market Services with securities fraud for participating in a wide-ranging scheme involving the reinvestment of proceeds from the sale of municipal securities."

Supporters of art-museum founder Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, are rallying round following my December 20 defense of her from an attack by Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg View. Among those speaking out are a former editor of the Sunday business section of the New York Times, Judith H. Dobrzynski; and also Michael Kinsley, who writes, "That's capitalism, and if we don't like the results, we can use the tools of government, primarily the tax code, to improve them."

A Boston Globe news article takes Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney to task for defending capital gains treatment for "carried interest" of managers of investment partnerships. The Globe doesn't mention that his tax plan calls for lowering the capital gains rate to zero for those with incomes below $200,000. But the most amazing part of the article is these three paragraphs:

Advocates of using the tax code to reduce income inequality are especially critical of the "carried interest" tax break. "It's probably the biggest loophole in the tax code for super-rich people," said Jacob S. Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale University and co-author of "Winner-Take-All Politics."

"The idea that private equity managers and hedge fund managers should pay 15 percent, when in fact they're just getting a cut from the pool of capital under management - it's completely egregious," Hacker said.

Reuters has published an article by Geraldine Fabrikant, who is identified by Reuters as "a senior writer for Business Day at The New York Times," about the "comeback" of the money manager and investment banker Steven Rattner. The article struck me as interesting for two reasons.

First, it includes the sentence, "Some journalists at both the New York Times and the Financial Times believe that Rattner should not be permitted to write for them after his controversies with the government." So you have a New York Times journalist writing for Reuters about how her New York Times colleagues don't think their own paper should be printing pieces from Mr. Rattner. It seems a somewhat unusual public airing of internal dissent at the Times.

The latest example of what I was writing about yesterday, that the headlines on President Obama's regulatory overreach have in some cases exceeded the actual implementation, comes with the news that the Department of Transportation and its secretary Ray LaHood, who actually have authority over the issue, are rejecting the National Transportation Safety Board's call for a ban on all cellphone use, even hands-free, while driving.

The ban on 100-watt incandescent light bulbs?

The National Labor Relations Board's action preventing Boeing from opening a factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state?

The IRS's cumbersome Form 1099 requirement as part of Obamacare?

All of these have been cited by Republicans on the campaign trail as examples of the regulatory overreaches of President Obama. But there's one other thing all three examples share — they've all been overturned, delayed, overridden or eliminated before voters will have a chance either to re-elect Mr. Obama or turn him out of office next year.

The spending bill approved late last week delays enforcement of the light-bulb ban, which was to have gone into effect January 1, until at least October 2012.

Earlier this month, the NLRB quietly dropped its case against Boeing.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column up at the Hoover Institution Web site, taking on Al Gore on the question of "Sustainable Capitalism." Professor Epstein is hard on Gore's recommendation that companies should stop issuing quarterly earnings guidance. Professor Epstein writes:

Remind me if I ever get rich not to start an art museum. It seems to be just an invitation for attacks from the press. First was Ronald Lauder, who started an art museum on Manhattan's Upper East Side and got smeared by the New York Times as a thank you. Now comes Alice Walton, whose Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas has gotten her not just one but two negative columns by Jeffrey Goldberg in Bloomberg News's View section.

The latest from the senator from Florida, Marco Rubio:

There is another thing I'd like to talk about which is a troubling emergence in the last year of politics, and it's really this rhetoric that in my opinion seeks to divide Americans against each other. …

There's this theme out there by some, including, quite frankly, many in our political leadership and from time to time even the White House, that is saying to people, 'The reason why you're worse off is because there is a handful of people out there that are doing too well. That the reason why you've lost your job is because someone else is being too greedy. That the reason why you're losing your home is because someone else owns too many homes. That the reason why you're making less money is because someone else is making too much money.'

Bloomberg has a rundown of one-percenters who have spoken up to defend themselves, including Jamie Dimon, John Paulson, Bernard Marcus, John A. Allison IV, Thomas Stemberg, Stephen Schwarzman, Tom Golisano, Ken Langone, Wilbur Ross, Robert Rosencranz, Peter Schiff, and Leon Cooperman. Said Mr. Dimon: "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it." Mr. Marcus: "said he isn't worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters. 'Who gives a crap about some imbecile?' Marcus said. 'Are you kidding me?'"