Thomas Sowell compares President Obama to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "People who say that Barack Obama cannot be re-elected with unemployment at its current level should take note that Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected a record four times, despite two consecutive terms in which unemployment was never as low as it is today."

The freshman Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, gave a big foreign policy speech yesterday at the Helms Center of Wingate University in North Carolina. A transcript is here and a YouTube video of the remarks is embedded below.

Highlights:

As dissidents and freedom fighters battle dictators around the world, they look for support to the greatest democracy in the world. And America must answer their call.

We do not seek to impose our vision of government. We do not insist that every nation must have a presidency, a supreme court or a bicameral legislature. Nor do we have any intention of using force to depose every despotic regime on the planet.

Michele Bachmann explained it last night in the debate:

We've got $1.2 trillion already that's been earned by American companies overseas. If we have a 0 percent tax rate, Wolf, we can bring that 1.2 trillion -- it's called repatriation -- bring that in. You'd have 1.2 trillion flooded into the system...

And it was mentioned here already as idea no. 5 on the list of 27 Ideas for Jobs and Growth

Offer a repatriation tax holiday that would let companies like Microsoft and Cisco, with big cash stashes overseas, bring the money back to America without being taxed at our high corporate tax rates. Senator Schumer has reportedly expressed some support for this idea.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial under the headline "The 2013 Tax Cliff" noticing that in 2013, "The capital gains and dividend taxes would also rise to an expected 20% rate from 15% today....Also starting in 2013 are two of ObamaCare's biggest tax increases: an additional 0.9-percentage point levy on top of the 2.9% Medicare tax for those earning more than $200,000, and a new 2.9% surcharge on investment income, including interest income. This will further increase the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends to 23.8%, for a roughly 60% increase in investment taxes in one year."

FutureOfCapitalism.com has obtained a copy of an invitation to one of the campaign fundraisers that Governor Perry is having in New York City later this month. The event is Tuesday afternoon, September 20, the ticket is $2,500 a person, the location is a Fifth Avenue apartment whose address I am not disclosing, and the hosts are Giovanna Cugnasca, Elizabeth and Mallory Factor, Ruth King, Hadassah Loeb, Adele and David Malpass, and Mitzi Purdue. Ms. King is active in the group Americans for a Safe Israel. Mr. Malpass is a Reagan-era Treasury official who was chief economist of Bear Stearns, ran in 2010 for Senate as a Republican in New York and now runs Encima Global. Mr. Factor is a pro-growth political activist and merchant banker whose move to South Carolina in 2006 was the subject of a front-page news article in the New York Sun.

The invitation I got came pre-filled with a "bundler tracking code" to make it easier for the campaign to credit fund-raisers.

The Institute for Justice, a non-profit libertarian law firm, sends the following release:

Arlington, Va.—Anti-eminent domain heroine Susette Kelo will soon join the likes of Erin Brockovich and Norma Rae in seeing her real-world drama turned into a mainstream movie.

Kelo lost her little pink house in a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in which the Court ruled that eminent domain could be used to take homes for private development projects—a decision that outraged the nation.

Lifetime Television is adapting the critically acclaimed Little Pink House: A True Story of Defiance and Courage by Jeff Benedict into a movie that is expected to move into production this fall and is slated for release sometime next year on the cable movie station. Brooke Shields will serve as both executive producer and star. Joining Shields as executive producer are Michael R. Goldstein and Michael G. Larkin of Larkin-Goldstein Productions.

The Census is out with those poverty, income, and health insurance statistics that I previewed in yesterday's Reason column, and, as I predicted, the news is grim:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that in 2010, median household income declined, the poverty rate increased and the percentage without health insurance coverage was not statistically different from the previous year.

Real median household income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2009 median.

The nation's official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent, up from 14.3 percent in 2009 ─ the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from 43.6 million in 2009 ─ the fourth consecutive annual increase and the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.

Bloomberg News reports that one of the ways President Obama wants to pay for his proposed $450 billion "jobs" bill is to limit the federal tax exemption for municipal bond interest income. What would the consequences of this be? One possibility would be to curb borrowing by state and local governments. That'd probably be a good outcome. Another possibility is that state and local governments would keep borrowing the same amount while raising taxes or cutting services (laying off police, firefighters, and teachers) to pay for the higher interest costs they'd have to pay now that they have less in the way of tax-exempt income to offer bond-buyers. That would probably be a less-good outcome. A third possibility is that the jobs bill passes, with federal spending to protect the jobs of teachers, police,and firefighters as part of it. Then the increased federal revenue from taxing municipal bond interest would just flow back to the state and local governments. The effect would be more power for Washington, since money that was once raised directly at the state and local levels is now run through Washington. A fourth possibility is that some of the money now invested in state and local bonds would begin to flow instead to corporate stocks and bonds, which would start to look more attractive on an after-tax, risk-adjusted return basis. That could be a good thing. A fifth possibility is that the money that was in state and local bonds now flows instead to Treasury bonds. If Treasury Secretary Geithner is worried about finding takers for all that newly authorized federal borrowing, what better way is there to make sure there are customers at those Treasury auctions than to raise taxes on the competing bond issuers, the state and local governments?

One of the interesting moments in the CNN/Tea Party debate came when CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer pressed Ron Paul, who was a physician before he was a congressman, on what should happen to uninsured individuals who become ill. Asked Mr. Blitzer, "But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" Dr. Paul responded, "No. I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s, when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, and the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals. And we've given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. This whole idea, that's the reason the cost is so high. The cost is so high because they dump it on the government, it becomes a bureaucracy. It becomes special interests."

Worst debate moments:

For Governor Perry: Senator Santorum and Rep. Michele Bachmann totally taking him to school on the cervical cancer vaccine issue, with Mr. Santorum saying, "This is big government run amok," and Ms. Bachmann shooting back at Mr. Perry's "If you're saying I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended" line by saying she was offended for the little girls, who, unlike Mr. Perry, don't get a do-over.

For Governor Romney, his contention, "We need to have a Fed. If we don't have a Fed, who's gonna run the currency? Congress?" He clearly doesn't comprehend the Constitution, which assigns Congress precisely that responsibility.

For Governor Huntsman, clumsily accusing Perry of treason for not favoring a secure border. Also, the claim, "This country needs to wean itself from its heroin-like addiction to foreign oil." What's wrong with Canadian oil? The guy's against free trade. Also, pretty much the whole debate was a worst moment for Mr. Huntsman.

Best debate moments:

Speaker Gingrich says the way to fix Social Security is get back to a full-employment economy.

Reason.com has posted my latest weekly column, about the Census Bureau's annual report on "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States." The news is expected to be so bad that the Obama administration has canceled the physical press conference and is just having a conference call. You can check the column out here.

Governor Romney is in South Carolina today touring the $2 billion Boeing factory that President Obama's National Labor Relations Board wants to shut down. Richard Epstein has some background on the case at the Hoover Institution Web site. It wouldn't do any harm to the federal budget to drop the NLRB's effort to force Boeing to build the 787 in Washington State instead of in South Carolina, and it would make companies more willing to build new factories without having to worry that the federal government will step in and try to force them closed.

For background on the 30-cost-free-job-creating ideas, along with idea no. 1, please see here. Thanks to all the reader-participant-community-member-watchdog-content co-creators who have already submitted ideas using the comments section, and please keep them coming. We'll be rolling them out at a rate of one each weekday until we get to 30.

The New York Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Paul Krugman, greeted the tenth anniversary of September 11 with a blog post contending, "The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it."

He concluded, "I'm not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons."

It's probably not worth using up one of your 20 monthly free nytimes.com page views to go look at the actual post. To me, though, almost more amazing than Professor Krugman's shame is his position on allowing comments. If he believes that "in its heart, the nation knows" that it is ashamed, why not allow comments from all those readers who want to say, "you know what, Professor Krugman, you are right, I am ashamed to be an American on September 11, thank you for voicing what I knew in my heart"? Actually, his refusal to allow comments amounts to a confession that he's wrong.

Michael Barone's latest column is about President Obama's jobs speech: "Pathetic promises....Political payoffs....Pettifoggery." Mr. Barone reports: "Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package -- sorry, American Jobs Act -- is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions."

Governor Rick Perry of Texas previews his Social Security answer for tonight's CNN/Tea Party debate with a USA Today op-ed piece: "By 2037, retirees will only get roughly 76 cents back for every dollar that is put into Social Security unless reforms are implemented. Imagine how long a traditional retirement or investment plan could survive if it projected investors would lose 24% of their money?"