"Egg farm regulations still skimpy" is the headline over a Des Moines Register article that appears in USA Today. The article reports:

One year after 1,900 people were sickened and a half-billion Iowa eggs were recalled, government inspectors continue to find unsanitary conditions and inadequate protections against salmonella on Iowa's egg farms....some of Iowa's major egg producers aren't meeting minimum federal standards intended to protect consumers from salmonella enteritidis.

Forbes has a quote from Eli Broad, who the magazine says has wealth of $5.8 billion, on Warren Buffett's call for higher taxes on the "super-rich." Says Mr. Broad: "Those of us who have gained great success have an obligation to pay more taxes. We've been coddled long enough and have tax breaks that 99.9% of the public don't have, and it's not fair."

The magazine doesn't follow up by asking Mr. Broad why he has chosen to organize his affairs by placing about $1.5 billion of his assets into the non-profit, tax-exempt Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, out of which Mr. Broad, according to the organization's 2009 tax return, paid himself a salary of $60,000 a year and a $4,726 contribution to his employee benefit plan for 30 hours a week of work. Another $800 million or so of Mr. Broad's assets have been placed into another non-profit, tax-exempt entity, the Broad Art Foundation.

Post-Irene, the Heritage Foundation flags a report it recently released:

In the course of 16 years, the yearly average of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declarations tripled from 43 under President George H. W. Bush to 89 under President Bill Clinton to 130 under President George W. Bush. In his two and a half years in office, President Obama has issued 360 declarations without the occurrence of one hurricane or large-scale earthquake. In the first six months of 2011, President Obama issued 144 declarations, which puts him on pace for 288 declarations for the year—by far the most in FEMA history. The current single-year record is President Clinton's 157 declarations in 1996.

For those interested in the topic, the August 24, 2007 New York Sun editorial Disaster Inflation is also well worth a look:

John Steele Gordon has a useful op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on the national debt: "Total debt is now 97.2% of GDP and climbing rapidly."

The chairman and chief executive officer of Cumberland Advisors, David Kotok, emails:

We are now upping our estimate of fourth-quarter GDP in the US economy. Billions will be spent on rebuilding and recovery. That will put some people back to work, at least temporarily. We speculate that Washington may set aside the usual destructive and divisive partisan political wrangling and act in the interest of the nation. That means there will be a flow of federal financial assistance to the disaster areas. We also suspect there will be a rapid response rather than Katrina-type delays. FEMA lives under a microscope these days.

We expect GDP growth in Q4 to exceed 2% and maybe approach 2.5% to 3%. This will be accomplished with low inflation and very low interest rates. The earthquake-hurricane rebuilding will pile on the recovery of the manufacturing sector.

Mr. Kotok may want to reread Frederic Bastiat's 1850 essay on "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen":

Compare how the New York Times covered Warren Buffett/Berkshire Hathway's investment in Bank of America with the way the New York Times covered Carlos Slim's investment in the New York Times. Bank of America gets all the pejorative adjectives — a front-page headline describing the bank as "shaky" atop a news article describing it as the country's "most beleaguered" financial institution, a treatment that has a way of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. When it came to the story about the Times's own finances, however, Mr. Slim's investment was covered in a way that spared the Times all the insults that the paper heaps on Bank of America.

It looks like President Obama will have one more "bad luck" thing to blame the slow economic growth, joblessness, and deficit on in addition to the Japanese tsunami and the rise in oil prices that the president attributed to the "Arab Spring." That is Irene, which is adversely impacting tourism, restaurants, and businesses, and which, if the past pattern holds, may also require federal expenditures for disaster assistance.

If the usual pattern holds, opportunistic politicians will soon be out denouncing price-gouging connected with Hurricane Irene, while opportunistic free-market economists will soon be out placing op-ed pieces defending prices as the best way to allocate scarce resources and to assure their delivery when and where they are needed. I went looking for something from Senator Schumer, who rarely misses an occasion to denounce what he sees as rapaciousness in the free enterprise system rather than praising its efficiency. Instead what I found was an article in the Hartford Courant quoting two of the state's laws:

Section 42-230 of the state statutes says that gouging is not permitted on "any retail item in a location which is subject to a disaster emergency declaration issued by the governor," according to Williams. The normal fluctuations in prices are permitted.

The National Labor Relations Board, fresh from telling Boeing it has to build planes with union workers in Washington State rather than open a factory in right-to-work South Carolina, is now (just in time for Labor Day) going to require employers to put up posters notifying employees of their right to organize a union. The NLRB press release about this is here, and a related NLRB fact sheet is here, helpfully advising employers that "Translated versions will be available, and must be posted at workplaces where at least 20% of employees are not proficient in English." No suggestion of what to do if the employees are not proficient in any other language, either. The Associated Press has a news article.

One under-mentioned point in the coverage of Slate's laying off its press critic, Jack Shafer. By doing so, the online magazine owned by the Washington Post Co. is eliminating the job of one of only two of the magazine's 57 or 58 staff and contributors who disclosed in 2008 that he was not planning to vote for Barack Obama for president. Fifty-five said they were voting for Mr. Obama.

The German federal president, Christian Wulff, gave the opening speech yesterday at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Economic Sciences, with 17 Nobel laureates gathered on the banks of Lake Constance. His concluding quote came not from some Ph.D. economist nor even from a European, but rather from Thomas Jefferson:

"We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." These are the famous words of the third President of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson, urgently warning – in the summer of 1816 – against government overindebtedness. In this summer of our disillusionment, which must mark the start of a process of reorientation, need anything else be said? We just might have learned a lesson.

Warren Buffett's decision to invest $5 billion in Bank of America might seem unrelated to Mr. Buffett's public policy campaign to raise taxes on the "super-rich," but in fact the two intersect in at least two significant ways.

The first is that it is yet another example of Mr. Buffett structuring his own and Berkshire Hathaway's affairs with special care so as to minimize the taxes that he owes, contradicting his professed desire to pay more taxes.

Bloomberg News reports that in exchange for $5 billion from Mr. Buffett, Bank of America "will sell cumulative perpetual preferred stock to Berkshire, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said today in a statement. The preferred stock pays an annual dividend of 6 percent, and Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire gets warrants to buy 700 million shares at about $7.14 each."

A Boston Globe columnist interviewed ten customers at a supermarket in a poor neighborhood of Boston. "Of the 10 Tropical customers I spoke to that afternoon, nine said they would like - make that love - to see a Wal-Mart in Dudley," the columnist writes. "I happen to think a Wal-Mart would be a disaster here in the long term. I also happen to have a job that means I can afford to shop elsewhere."

Steve Jobs's resignation as CEO of Apple offers an opportunity to reflect on a great success story of America and capitalism. Where else, and under what other system, could someone without a college degree, whose biological father, a Syrian professor named Abdulfattah Jandali, gave him up for adoption, build a company so successful that it that amassed a greater store of cash than the U.S. government and annual revenue approximately twice the annual GDP of the entire country of Syria? My first home computer was an Apple Macintosh bought in the 1980s, and I've put out at least four different newspapers and four different Web sites on Apple machines.

Amity Shlaes has a Bloomberg News column on Eric Singer's Congressional Effect Fund, which invests in stocks only when Congress is on recess, and goes to treasuries when Congress is in session. Her conclusion: "Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has lately been ripping President Barack Obama for taking a 10-day holiday on Martha's Vineyard; he argues that Obama should abort his holiday and hurry back to the Oval Office. But the Congressional Effect theory suggests Obama is right to enjoy his island stay, and might even lengthen it."