From David Frum's review in Sunday's New York Times of That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, which was reviewed here on Friday:

How about this statistic from Friedman and Mandelbaum: "Thirty years ago, 10 percent of California's general revenue fund went to higher education and 3 percent to prisons. Today nearly 11 percent goes to prisons and 8 percent to higher education."

Last month here I listed 27 ideas for jobs and growth, to which reader-participant-watchdog-content-co-creators-community members added valuably, and Reason.com did its own symposium of job-creating ideas. Last night President Obama announced his $450 billion plan, reflecting, to a large degree, the consensus expressed last week by the president of Yale, Richard Levin, in his freshman address contending, "Since January 2009 it has been clear that there is only one way to prevent a deep and prolonged recession and avoid persistent high unemployment. We needed then, as we need now, a massive fiscal stimulus in the form of direct job creation, not tax cuts." I'm not an economist and don't have a Yale degree, but just as a counterargument to the Keynesian orthodoxy, let's try here to list 30 job creating ideas that don't require any additional government spending. We'll start today and try to keep up at the pace of one a day, Monday through Friday, for the month ahead.

Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum's new book, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, is pretty newsworthy — how often do you see a three-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, in one book, more or less endorse both the gold standard and a third-party presidential candidate?

But the aspects of this volume that are worth noticing go way beyond those two. I was struck by what might be called cultural conservatism. The authors quote the governor of Pennsylvania, Edward Rendell, complaining that the National Football League postponed a game because of a snowstorm. Said Mr. Rendell: "It goes against everything that football is all about. We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked, and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

From Conn Carroll's Morning Examiner email:

President Obama ordered Congress to "pass this bill" more than a dozen times last night. There is just one problem: no such bill exists. After Obama's speech, White House Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett said Obama would be drafting the legislation next week. If Obama really wanted his "American Jobs Act" to pass, he would have had the text of the legislation ready for everyone to read last night.

That explains more why Mr. Obama had to state so explicitly, "This isn't political grandstanding." If he hadn't told us so, we might have thought that getting up and giving a speech insisting "pass this bill" when the bill hasn't been written yet might qualify as that. It's almost comical.

President Obama has gotten to the point with me that by merely giving a speech in favor of something, he can turn me against policies that I believe in and support. The two big examples in the "American Jobs Act" are unemployment insurance reform and tax cuts.

I've been agitating here for unemployment insurance reform for weeks. A White House fact sheet indicates Mr. Obama has adopted many of my suggestions, including, as the White House puts it, "States will be able to seek waivers from the Secretary of Labor to implement other innovative reforms to connect the long-term unemployed to work opportunities" and "States will have flexibility to help long-term unemployed workers create their own jobs by starting their own small businesses." I'd prefer these programs apply to all unemployed workers rather than just "long-term," and I'd prefer the states have the flexibility as of right rather than having to seek permission from the secretary of labor. But even so, it's a step in the right direction by recognizing that unemployment benefits, as currently constituted, create incentives to stay unemployed.

There are plenty of other points to make about President Obama's speech on jobs, but one thing that leaped right out at me was how one section was lifted, without any credit, from Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum's new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

Here is Mr. Obama:

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. But in the middle of a Civil War, he was also a leader who looked to the future – a Republican president who mobilized government to build the transcontinental railroad; launch the National Academy of Sciences; and set up the first land grant colleges.

Here are Messrs. Friedman and Mandelbaum, on pages 37 to 38:

The big news out of the MSNBC-Politico Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library was probably the way the new entrant, Governor Perry of Texas, went after the previous front-runner, Governor Romney of Massachusetts: "We created more jobs in the last three months in Texas than he created in four years in Massachusetts....Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, governor."

How that will play is another question. To my ears and eyes, Mr. Perry appeared oddly aggressive in his attack on Mr. Romney, while Mr. Romney was more classy in keeping the focus of his criticism on President Obama. Mr. Romney's criticism of Mr. Obama — "never worked in the private sector" — functioned also as a subtle criticism of Mr. Perry, whose career has mostly been in government. But it was subtle rather than the sledgehammer with which Mr. Perry went after Mr. Romney. Mr. Romney did directly criticize Mr. Perry for characterizing Social Security as a failure. "I would never say failure," Mr. Romney said, to which Mr. Perry countered, "maybe its time to have some provocative language in this country."

NPR has an excerpt of a new book by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back. I look forward to reading the whole book, but the short excerpt at NPR displays a kind of China-envy: "It took China's Teda Construction ­Group ­thirty-​­two weeks to build a ­world-​­class convention center from the ground up — ​­including giant escalators in every corner — ​­and it was taking the Washington ­Metro crew ­twenty-​­four weeks to repair two tiny escalators of ­twenty-​­one steps each."

National Public Radio has a ridiculously biased piece on the Republican presidential candidates and science:

the message is clear — Bachmann believes something other than physical and biological processes drives events on planet Earth.

Perry does too.

At a campaign stop last month, a child asked Perry what he thinks about evolution. He told the boy, "it's a theory out there that has some gaps in it."

At a voter breakfast in New Hampshire, Perry was asked about the overwhelming scientific evidence that shows human actions are a substantial cause of global warming. While he did agree that the climate was changing, he said that it's been changing since the Earth began.

"Scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change," Perry said.

Via Rush Limbaugh's free "Rush in a Hurry" email newsletter comes a reference to this USA Today article headlined, "More Restaurants Are Targeting Customers Who Use Food Stamps." Florida, California, Arizona, and Michigan allow restaurants to accept food stamps from "disabled, elderly and homeless people." Says USA Today: "Louisville-based Yum! Brands, whose restaurants include Taco Bell, KFC, Long John Silver's and Pizza Hut, is trying to get restaurants more involved, federal lobbying records show."

More: "Between 2005 and 2010, the number of businesses certified in the SNAP program went from about 156,000 to nearly 209,000, according to USDA data. There is big money at stake. USDA records show food stamp benefits swelled from $28.5 billion to $64.7 billion in that period."

Reason.com has posted my latest weekly column, which is about September 11. Please have a look at it here.

Thomas Sowell has a column pushing back against that New York Times column scrutinizing Apple's Steve Jobs for not being more of a prominent philanthropist. Writes Mr. Sowell: "Trying to rope Steve Jobs into this world ignores how many other famous businessmen, whose achievements in business have benefited society, have created philanthropies whose harm has offset those benefits....Let business pioneers do what they do best. And let the rest of us exercise more judgment as to how much charity is beneficial and how much more simply perpetuates dependency, grievances and the polarization of society."

Mitt Romney has a USA Today op-ed: "Tomorrow, I will introduce a plan consisting of 59 specific proposals — including 10 concrete actions I will take on my first day in office — to turn around America's economy."

Mr. Romney writes: "taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains for middle-income taxpayers should be eliminated." It sounds like he's moving in the right direction by lowering taxes rather than increasing them. But there's a case for having a single low rate for everyone rather than dividing Americans, Obama-style, into "middle-income taxpayers" versus the rich.

Israeli journalist Amotz Asa-El predicts in a Marketwatch column that Prime Minister Netanyahu will lurch leftward on domestic issues to address complaints by protesters:

The first victim will be the corporate tax, which under Netanyahu's leadership was gradually reduced from 36% in 2003 to 25% and was planned to settle at 18% by 2016, a level that would have been the lowest in the OECD. Now this process will be halted, to show that burdens are being shifted to the haves, and to fund new social spending.

After the corporate-tax retreat will come the capital-gains tax, which will likely be raised. And then will come the defense budget, whose size, nearly 15% of the budget, is second to nothing in Israel. And finally, income taxes within the highest brackets' might be raised, albeit moderately. At the same time, the value-added tax, currently at 16%, may be sharply cut.

Well, cutting the value-added tax sounds like a good idea. As for the rest of it, good luck with that.

The front page of the print edition of Saturday's Wall Street Journal featured three color pictures of a spaceship backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos through the company Blue Origin LLC. Under it is a cutline that reads in part: "Spinning Out: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos said Friday his privately funded space venture had to destroy an unmanned rocket last week after it lost control during a test flight." The first paragraph of the article inside the paper reports that the test flight highlighted "the dramatic risks of private space ventures."