As a follow-up to yesterday's post on the Obama administration's job-killing regulation of the fishing industry, this 53-second video from the Democrat who is mayor of Gloucester, Mass., Carolyn Kirk, is worth a view.

The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal sketching his tax plan:

The plan starts with giving Americans a choice between a new, flat tax rate of 20% or their current income tax rate. The new flat tax preserves mortgage interest, charitable and state and local tax exemptions for families earning less than $500,000 annually, and it increases the standard deduction to $12,500 for individuals and dependents. This simple 20% flat tax will allow Americans to file their taxes on a postcard, saving up to $483 billion in compliance costs...My plan also abolishes the death tax once and for all...we will lower the corporate tax rate to 20%—dropping it from the second highest in the developed world to a rate on par with our global competitors. Second, we will encourage the swift repatriation of some of the $1.4 trillion estimated to be parked overseas by temporarily lowering the rate to 5.25%...We will eliminate the tax on qualified dividends and long-term capital gains.

A front-page Wall Street Journal article about trading by Steven Cohen's SAC hedge fund has a couple of examples of the regulatory revolving door:

"Finra is trying to do its job, but you also have to consider that this particular firm is a huge firm, and there's lots of trading," said Paul Atkins, a former SEC commissioner who now does regulatory consulting. He said SAC isn't a client.

And:

Since Sen. Grassley's office went public with the document requests, SAC has hired two of the senator's former staffers, Kenneth Cunningham and Cory Crowley, as consultants to provide insights into the office's next steps, people familiar with the matter said. The two didn't respond to requests for comment.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new piece about eminent domain and property rights up at the Hoover Institution Web site: "When it comes to identifying the many sources of American decline, one item that deserves a high place on that list is the gratuitous destruction of private property rights, a process that has been aided and abetted by the Supreme Court for too long. It is indeed ironic that as China tries to codify a system of private property rights, the United States seems all too willing to move in the wrong direction."

Let fishermen fish instead of having some Harvard Ph.D. ecologist "genius" bureaucrat stand in their way. For details on this one, please don't miss my weekly column, which is posted here at the New York Sun and here at Reason.com.

Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 29: Change the tone.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 28: Deregulate transportation at the local level.

Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 27. Fix immigration in a way that opens the door wider to more legal immigrants.

On Monday, October 17, Glenn Beck posted a list of "Questions For the Occupy Wall Street Crowd," among them:

AGREED: PEOPLE SHOULD PAY THEIR FAIR SHARE IN TAXES.
QUESTIONS
>>WHAT IS THAT NUMBER? WHAT IS FAIR?
>>IF IT'S NOT ZERO – PLEASE EXPLAIN GE (AND WHY WASN'T IMMELT ON THE RICH HOMES TOUR?)... GE PAYS NO INCOME TAX, THEIR CEO IS ON THE PRESIDENTS ECONOMIC COUNCIL – WHY DO YOU NOT PROTEST GE?

On Saturday, the "Occupy" protesters reportedly showed up at GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt's house in New Canaan, Conn. (Link via Instapundit.)

Set the right tone. I was reminded of this by the remarks Eric Cantor prepared for delivery today at Wharton. They are worth reading in full, but here were the highlights for me:

Confused by the two apparently conflicting views of Occupy Wall Street's relations with the Jews — The Emergency Committee for Israel portrays the occupiers as a bunch of anti-Semites, while the Forward described Kol Nidre services being held at Occupy Wall Street on Yom Kippur — I went down there myself Thursday night for "Occupy Simchat Torah."

Sure enough, a couple of hundred mostly young Jews participated in joyous dancing and singing with two torah scrolls (video here) to celebrate the holiday that marks the end of one annual cycle of reading the Torah and the beginning of a new one. There were plenty of faces I recognized — Hebrew school directors, rabbis, seminary professors, Jewish day school teachers, and employees at other non-profits, many of which are funded largely if not exclusively by Jews who work on Wall Street.

Deregulate transportation at the local level. Two recent news items bring this to the fore.

The first reports that two New York City taxi medallions changed hands for $1 million each. (The New York Sun would probably say this is as much or more a story about the decline of the value of the dollar than about the rise in the price of a taxi medallion, and it might well be right, but that's another story.) If the city lifted the limit on the number of medallions, or just made it easier for car-service drivers to accept street hails (as Mayor Bloomberg is trying to do over taxi industry opposition), it would be easier for customers to hail cabs, and there'd be more cab-driver jobs created. The current system just enriches the medallion owners at the expense of riders and of job-creation.

At the Atlantic, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Arizona, Andrei Cherny, proposes a "Steve Jobs Act":

reform of the unemployment insurance system to allow for more flexibility for potential entrepreneurs. And it would build on the emerging bipartisan consensus that certain regulations such as the accounting requirements in the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms have a disproportionate impact on young firms ill-equipped to handle the onerous burdens.

From Mike Allen's Politico Playbook:

EXCLUSIVE: President Obama's political team today will announce a new effort to court RELIGIOUS VOTERS in 2012. Democratic officials say they see an opening with Christians on immigration...

What's the pitch going to be to Christians on immigration? "Vote for us Democrats, we failed to pass immigration reform even though we controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for two years, because it was a lower priority for us than ObamaCare or Dodd-Frank financial reform or a bunch of other measures that we did manage to get passed?"

Fix immigration in a way that opens the door wider to more legal immigrants. The New York Sun and the Wall Street Journal both have pieces on this issue out today. As Leonard Lauder puts it in the Wall Street Journal: "Our political leaders say they want to reform these rules, yet they have consistently failed to make changes. By creating barriers to immigration we are forcing talented people to bring their ideas and energy to other countries where they will compete with the U.S. in the future. As we work to get our economy on track, we need more of these creative and innovative entrepreneurs to help create new jobs here in America."

Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 26: Pass the Northern Arizona Mining Continuity Act, preventing the Obama administration's Interior Department from halting uranium mining in Northern Arizona.

Bloomberg News reports:

Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation's greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.

The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.

Mickey Kaus writes: "Non-government employees may also wonder why it's civil servants whose jobs get protected first in the name of Keynes. … Again, if you can't cut back the government bureaucracy in good times (because there is enough tax money and we have "unmet needs," etc.) and you can't cut it in bad times (because we have to preserve those jobs as "stimulus') when does the government stop growing?"

This may have been the best debate yet, mainly because CNN's Anderson Cooper largely let the candidates just go at each other, but also perhaps because Jon Huntsman did not participate, so those of us who find him grating were spared.

The most newsworthy exchange was between Governor Perry and Governor Romney. Governor Perry said to Governor Romney: "You hired illegals in your home." Mr. Perry said it was "the height of hypocrisy" for Mr. Romney to accuse Mr. Perry of being soft on illegal immigration.

Mr. Romney got a bit rattled at Mr. Perry for interrupting during his answer, explaining that the illegals were hired by a gardening contractor. "I'm speaking," Mr. Romney said at one point, appearing to lose his temper and place his hand on Mr. Perry's shoulder, while saying that it had been "a tough couple of debates for Rick."

Here's the video on the immigration exchange: