This morning's jobs report was pretty grim; the payroll survey showed zero net job creation for August, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised downward the payroll reports for June (26,000 fewer jobs than initially reported) and July (32,000 fewer jobs than initially reported).

There are a lot of problems with David Brooks's latest New York Times column, but here's one that's really basic. Here is Mr. Brooks describing what he calls the Republican narrative: "The current task, therefore, is, as Rick Perry says, to make the government 'inconsequential' in people's lives — to pare back the state to revive personal responsibility and private initiative."

The most popular article on Yahoo! News this morning runs under the headline "Should the Starting Salary for a Teacher Be $60,000" and reports:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposed last month that a significant boost in teacher salaries could transform public schools for the better by luring the country's brightest college graduates into the profession.

Teachers should be paid a starting salary of $60,000, Duncan said, with the opportunity to make up to $150,000 a year. That's higher than the salaries of most high school principals, who are generally paid much more than teachers.

The median salary among all middle school teachers, for example, not just those starting out in the profession, is around $52,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From the March 20, 2009 press release from the Department of Energy headlined "Obama Administration Offers $535 Million Loan Guarantee to Solyndra, Inc.":

Secretary Chu is moving aggressively to accelerate important Department of Energy investments that can create jobs and transform the way America uses and produces energy. This allows the Department of Energy to offer its first loan guarantee within the first two months of the Obama Administration. This loan guarantee will be supported through the President's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provides tens of billions of dollars in loan guarantee authority to build a new green energy economy....

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had "voted unanimously to request public comment on the treatment of asset-backed issuers as well as real estate investment trusts (REITs) and other mortgage-related pools under the Investment Company Act." If you thought owners or potential owners of these REITs would be grateful for the prospect of additional SEC protection, well, you'd be wrong. Shares of REITs declined in response to the news, as a dispatch by Dow Jones Newswires reported:

Real estate stocks focused on mortgage-backed securities tumbled Thursday, a day after the Securities and Exchange Commission launched a review that could subject these companies to tighter regulation....Among the biggest stock losers this session include Annaly Capital Management (NLY), which traded down 3.59% at $17.48, and CYS Investments, down 5% at $12.68. Hatteras Financial Corp. (HTS) dropped 3.55% to $26.61.

ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger, whose work I have criticized in the past, makes a good point in writing about Warren Buffett's investment in Bank of America:

Mr. Buffett's investment reveals something both infuriating and scary. Bank of America has not been talking straight about its need for capital.

"You cannot have the largest bank in the country saying, 'We don't need the money,' and then paying this kind of price to Warren Buffett for capital they say they don't need," said Daniel Alpert, who runs the investment firm Westwood Capital. "Industrywide, it's a potential boomerang because we think, 'Why should we believe any of these guys when they say they don't need the money?' "

"We've been through a massive crisis in 2007 and '08 where executives of major financial institutions tried to hide their insolvency," he added. "They said, 'No, no, a thousand times no, we're fine.' And then they were gone."

Another government-backed American solar energy company, Solyndra, has filed for bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial, the New York Times has a news article ("The Energy Department gave Solyndra a conditional guarantee for $535 million, in multiple stages, contingent on reaching a variety of milestones, and to date, it had received $527 million. ... More than 1,000 employees were laid off"), and embedded below is a YouTube video of President Obama's May 2010 visit to a Solyndra factory in California. Said the president, "Incredible, cutting edge solar panels that you are manufacturing… it is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism, and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly, the best workers in the world, and you guys all represent that….Companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future....The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra."

A report by the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies that 25 corporate CEOs earned more than their companies paid in taxes has attracted a surprising amount of press coverage. The Washington Post has an article by Peter Whoriskey, Politico has a dispatch by Mackenzie Weinger, the New York Times has a story by David Kocieniewski, public radio's "Marketplace" program has a piece by Eve Troeh, and Bloomberg has an article by Andrew Zajac.

Of these five articles, four — all but Bloomberg News — described the IPS's political leanings. Marketplace called it "liberal-leaning," Politico called it "left-leaning," the Washington Post called it "liberal," and the New York Times called it "liberal-leaning." (None asked what's "liberal" about an organization that's partnered with the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which would replace Israel with a Hamas-run state that jails homosexuals and bans women from driving, but that's a separate issue.) Two — the New York Times and the Washington Post — included some reaction from the corporations being criticized. And exactly zero of the articles pointed out the hypocrisy of the Institute for Policy Studies, which as a non-profit not only pays no taxes itself at the corporate level but funds itself by offering tax deductions to donors, complaining about corporate taxes and compensation.

Warren Buffett's company, Berkshire Hathaway has put out a press release disputing the Wall Street Journal editorial about his taxes on the Bank of America preferred dividend, and, by extension, the earlier post here on the same topic. Says the press release:

Virtually all of the stocks that Berkshire owns are held in its property-casualty subsidiaries, and that will be the case with the Bank of America preferred.

The tax treatment for dividends paid by U.S. corporations to property-casualty insurance companies was materially changed by a law passed in 1986. The changes were described in detail in the chairman's letter included in Berkshire's 1986 annual report.

A minor change in rate was made in 1993. Since that time dividends that insurers receive from U.S. companies incur an effective tax rate of 14.175%. For Berkshire, that rate will apply to dividends it receives from Bank of America.

The National Labor Relations Board's new rule requiring employers to post notices advising employees of their right to organize a union, which was the subject of a post here on August 26, is now the topic of an editorial in the August 31 Wall Street Journal.

From "The Administrators Ate My Tuition," in the September-October issue of the Washington Monthly:

Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students.

So that's where all the Pell Grant money goes. More:

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new piece up about price controls and a medicine shortage:

Unfortunately, the law of supply and demand "really apply to cancer drugs," for it confidently predicts shortages whenever price controls are applied. That is what is happening here.

Thomas Sowell has a new column likening President Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

As unusual as 9 percent unemployment rates may seem to the current generation of Americans, unemployment rates stayed in double digits for months and years on end during the 1930s. Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration followed policies very similar to those of the Obama administration today. He also got away with it politically by blaming his predecessor.

Mr. Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial in today's paper making the point made in a post here back on August 25 about the Buffett-Berkshire investment in Bank of America being structured to take advantage of the dividends-received deduction, or DRD.

Reason.com has posted my latest weekly column, which is about Irene and the Financial Crisis. Check it out here.