Christine Rouselle, a college student who worked as a summer cashier at a Walmart in Maine, describes what she saw:

a) People ignoring me on their iPhones while the state paid for their food. (For those of you keeping score at home, an iPhone is at least $200, and requires a data package of at least $25 a month. If a person can spend $25+ a month so they can watch YouTube 24/7, I don't see why they can't spend that money on food.)

b) People using TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) money to buy such necessities such as earrings, kitkat bars, beer, WWE figurines, and, my personal favorite, a slip n' slide. TANF money does not have restrictions like food stamps on what can be bought with it.

c) Extravagant purchases made with food stamps; including, but not limited to: steaks, lobsters, and giant birthday cakes.

Thank you to all those who became paying subscribers or renewed existing subscriptions during last week's drive. If you meant to do it but just didn't get to it, the How To Help page is still open for business. If you want to help the FutureOfCapitalism community in some other way, here are some options:

Mitt Romney has an op-ed in USA Today framing the choice in 2012:

In an Entitlement Society, government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk. In an Opportunity Society, free people living under a limited government choose whether or not to pursue education, engage in hard work, and pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams. If they succeed, they merit the rewards they are able to enjoy.

My column this week focuses on the victims of Kim Jong Il and on the opportunity that his death creates to advance freedom. It's up at Reason.com (here) and at the New York Sun (here). Gruesome stuff, but if you have the stomach for it, please have a look.

The New York Observer's Foster Kamer has a dispatch about how the New York Times has "bought out" several of its veteran employees, while retaining them as "contractors" to do the same jobs they were doing before. It quotes an email from Times staffer-turned-contractor Diana B. Henriques:

You may hear that I have accepted the latest NYT buyout. I have, but I am not retiring or leaving the Times. I was immediately offered and accepted a contract to work as a contributing writer – same email, same phone, same address, an NYT cubicle, etc.

And the Observer article further notes:

Ms. Henriques is not the only one with a contributing gig moving forward with the paper; Clyde Haberman [who also took the buyout] will continue to write his Metro column for the paper's CityRoom blog, The Day, as a freelance contributor, thrice-weekly (as opposed to his previous schedule of appearing four-times-a-week).

The Cato Institute's Walter Olson writes that following the misleading call by the head of the National Transportation Safety Board for a ban on all cellphone use while driving, "one has to ask" whether the board is even worth keeping around.

"N. Koreans Rally Around Heir" is the Pravda-like headline on the Boston Globe home page under the news of the death of Kim Jong Il.

I found this hard to believe. Kim Jong Il's personality cult and communist, totalitarian system have given North Korea an annual GDP per capita estimated at $1,800, compared to $30,000 in the free, capitalist, democratic South Korea. The differences in political and economic systems and in related physical well-being are so stark that, as John McCain pointed out in a 2008 presidential debate, South Koreans are three inches taller than North Koreans. Why would North Koreans "rally around" such a brutal, dictatorial family regime rather than bidding it good riddance and breathing a sigh of relief that it is gone?

Thank you to all the new subscribers and newly renewed subscribers who have responded over the past week to our quarterly drive. This will be the final reminder and sales pitch, so please, if you have been meaning to get around to it, take a minute or two right now and sign up. It won't take long. The cost, on a weekly basis or daily basis, is not great. And the signal of support you will be sending is an important one, and necessary to sustain the site's operations and growth. So just do it, please. The link is here.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a civil case, is accusing the former CEO of Freddie Mac, Richard Syron, of securities fraud. Mr. Syron served from 1989 to 1994 as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has a Ph.D. in economics from Tufts, and also worked as an assistant to Paul Volcker. According to the complaint, Mr. Syron's compensation "grew from approximately $14.7 million in 2006 to $18.3 million in 2007." Without passing judgment on Mr. Syron's alleged behavior, one wonders whether the "fraud" would have been noticed or harmed anyone had Henry Paulson not decided to seize the company from its shareholders.

The Heritage Foundation has some information on H.R. 3671, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, or what Heritage calls the "highly discouraging" "mega-omni" $1 trillion spending bill. While the House Budget Committee distracts everyone with the Ryan-Wyden bipartisan Medicare reform plan — look over there! — the House is busy rushing through passage of a huge spending bill. Congress's own Web site reports that the bill was introduced December 14, but at this writing there's no text of the bill on the Web site. The House is trying to pass it quickly to avert a government shutdown, but it looks to be another violation of Boehner's Pledge to publish the text of all legislation online for three days before voting on it.

Tonight's Fox News Iowa debate was more frustrating to watch than some of the Wolf Blitzer-moderated CNN debates or the ABC News one the other Saturday night because the approach here seemed to asking gotcha questions individually to each candidate rather than letting the candidates go at each other or all answer the same questions.

So it was really more of a serial interview between Fox News and the candidates, as opposed to a debate among the candidates moderated by Fox News. The candidates weren't so much debating each other as the journalists were trying to debate the candidates. I say this as someone who likes Fox News and appreciates being on there very occasionally as a guest, and who can sympathize with a journalist who, seizing the opportunity to question a presidential candidate, asks a gotcha question. Tonight, though, the results were a bit disappointing. It's hard to tell how much of this is Fox's fault and how much was the ground rules negotiated by the campaigns.

The New York Times Company today abruptly announced that its 61-year-old chief executive officer, Janet Robinson, will leave at the end of the year, with no permanent successor lined up.

An SEC filing says Ms. Robinson will get $4.5 million plus health insurance for a 12-month retirement and consulting agreement, including "two-year non-competition, non-solicitation and non-disparagement covenants, a three-year cooperation covenant and an indefinite confidentiality covenant."

The Times itself reported that Ms. Robinson's pay in 2009 was $4.9 million, so she'll earn almost as much as a retired consultant as as a full-time CEO.

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From an NPR piece headlined "Experts Question Need for Stronger Cellphone Ban":

states with cellphone bans have seen no real decrease in accident rates.

"The curious thing is that even as cellphone use has increased exponentially by drivers in vehicles, we see no surge in crashes," Rader says. "So as this trend has accelerated, with more and more people having phones in their cars and using them, the number of overall crashes has been declining."

The host on WBGO-FM this morning suggested a ban on eyeliner application while driving.

The comments string on the earlier post here on this topic gets into the issue further.

"Census shows 1 in 2 people are poor or low-income" is the headline over an Associated Press dispatch reporting, "Squeezed by rising living costs, a record number of Americans -- nearly 1 in 2 -- have fallen into poverty or are scraping by on earnings that classify them as low income."

The article quotes Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation pointing out that a lot of these "poor" people have houses, cars, and wide-screen televisions. If you are low income but own a house debt-free, you may be doing okay. But even so, the article says the numbers of the poor or low-income have grown since 2009: