Senator Marco Rubio, telling Rush Limbaugh why raising taxes isn't a good answer to the budget problem:

we've got this President's obsession with raising taxes -- and what bothers me the most about it is not just that it will kill jobs and is bad for our economy. What bothers me the most is there isn't a single tax package out there that's reasonable and realistic that would even put a dent on this debt crisis. I mean, people have no idea what you'd have to raise in taxes in this country to just to begin to make a difference. Of course you never can raise it to that level because you won't be able to collect them because, you know, people aren't dumb enough to work for free. I mean, if you're gonna tax all their money they're not gonna keep working.

"Former Tax-Collectors Turn Out To Make Great Free Market Leaders" is the headline over my latest column, which appears in The New York Sun.

Hugh Hewitt's advice for Republicans on the budget battle:

the House GOP needs to adopt and repeat --again and again and again-- a clear, simple and powerful message, specifically: "Mr. President, send us a list of non-defense cuts to federal spending. We will enact them all, and raise the debt ceiling for every dollar of spending we cut."

That's what is needed, a list of spending cuts from the president.

"Meetings are not necessary or even useful," the GOP must say --again, and again, and again. "What we need is the president's list."

Once articulated all the GOP need do is send out Speaker Boehner, Leader Cantor or Whip Kevin McCarthy on the hour to remind people that the president hasn't sent his list yet and thus the debt ceiling is closer and any crisis that looms belongs to the president.

Mona Charen has a column up at Yahoo! News:

Speaking for himself on July 11, the president offered that he had "hundreds of thousands of dollars that I don't need."

The president is of course welcome to donate as much of his extra money as he likes to the federal treasury. He knows Timothy Geithner personally and can probably get a guarantee that his check will be cashed without delay. And since the president is so ready to impute unpleasant motives (like greed) to those who oppose tax increases, perhaps we should impute some sort of moral failing to him for not having thus far contributed his spare change to the government.

More: "The president may be perfectly confident that the best use of his excess cash is to pay more taxes. Those who live in the real world may consider the government hopelessly wasteful and inefficient."

Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, has a piece out discussing Catholicism and the budget:

Asked about rising government debt, Pope Benedict XVI has said: "[W]e are living at the expense of future generations … in untruth. We live on the basis of appearances, and the huge debts are meanwhile treated as something that we are simply entitled to." It is immoral for governments to make promises they cannot fulfill.

Budgetary discipline is a moral imperative....The dignity of the human person, said Blessed Pope John Paul II, is compromised when bureaucratic ways of thinking — which he dubbed the "welfare state" or "social assistance state" — dominate our lives with heartless regulations and impersonal rationing. This is why our budget repeals the new health care law with its taxpayer funding of abortions, government control over the health care sector and panel of bureaucrats empowered to ration Medicare.

President Obama had a press conference this morning to talk about a budget deal. It was sort of a strange press conference, because the president devoted almost as much time, or more, to the process of dealmaking as he did to the substance of the deal.

The deal needs to happen now, he said, because as it gets closer to the election, "it's not going to get easier, it's going to get harder." This seems to me to display a kind of contempt for the American voter. Certainly one of the messages of the 2010 election was that voters wanted Washington to get spending under control. Yet Mr. Obama seems to think a budget deal is going to be so unpopular that it should be far enough away from an election that voters are able to somehow forget about it. "We want to cut everybody else's stuff and we want to keep our stuff," the president said, speaking of the American people, and taking an oddly detached approach.

"Understanding the Solar Home Price Premium: Electricity Generation and 'Green' Social Status" is the title of a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, written by two economists from the University of California, Los Angeles and two from the University of California, San Diego. Highlights:

Judged on strictly efficiency criteria (foregone electricity expenditure per dollar of investment), solar panels may be a bad investment. Borenstein (2008) finds that the cost of a solar photovoltaic system is about 80 percent greater than the value of the electricity it will produce.

Two invitations to Google+ finally reached me this afternoon and I spent some time tonight playing around with the service. It is similar to Facebook except that instead of one giant mass of undifferentiated friends, Google+ readers can group their "friends" into "circles" — family members, business associates, college friends, etc. That makes it easier to share only what's appropriate with each group.

I can understand the problem this is designed to solve. Certain of my left-wing family members might not want to see links to my right-wing political commentary, and certain of my right-wing political followers or business associates might not want to see the family vacation pictures.

A professor at Yale, Jonathan Macey, has a piece up on the Hoover Institution Web site about the Securities and Exchange Commission and how it judges its own success: "The SEC satisfies its monitors in Congress, in academia, and in the press by focusing on factors that can be measured. In particular, the SEC focuses on two factors: (a) the raw number of cases that it brings; (b) on the sheer size of the fines that it collects."

Professor Macey doesn't make this point, but this is like judging a police force's success by a rise in the number of arrests rather than by a decline in the number of crimes.

More: "notwithstanding the fact that the SEC's budget nearly tripled between 2000 and 2010, the Commission's current chairman and senior staff have argued that its recent failures can be addressed by increasing the agency's funding."

Archer Daniels Midland is a member in good standing of the Crony Capitalism Index. The company benefits both from federal subsidies to ethanol and from tariffs on imported ethanol. Its CEO was a guest at President Obama's January 19, 2011 state dinner for President Hu of China and is also a member of the President's Export Council. So it fits that Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett dropped the name of ADM, based in Mr. Obama's home state of Illinois, as the "kind of company we look at" as a potential acquisition.

If Mr. Buffett were actually going to buy ADM for Berkshire, I don't see what he'd gain by touting the stock publicly in advance — it just drives up the price, making the company more expensive to buy. But maybe I am missing something. A cynic would say that some Buffett associates were poised, David Sokol style, to buy ADM for their personal accounts, and now that Mr. Buffett has made it public that ADM is a potential Berkshire target, they can go buy all they want without being accused of "insider trading" by some reporter or regulator's definition.

Let's stipulate that Speaker Boehner wants to do what is best for the country and the economy. Even so, the report by Politico that the Republican Speaker of the House is aiming for a deal with President Obama before the 2012 election on a ten-year, $4 trillion deficit reduction plan that includes $1 trillion in new federal revenues through tax reform/simplification that is not revenue-neutral caused me to stop and think about the politics of it from Mr. Boehner's point of view.

Watching President Obama's remarks on the jobs report, one thing that struck me was that his prescription for job-creation — free-trade agreements, a tax cut, and "we've got to to rein in our deficits and help the government live within its means" — isn't particularly radical and in fact is something a lot of independents and Republicans can agree on. People may disagree about the nature of the tax cut — Mr. Obama wants a one-year extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax cut, while Republicans might prefer something aimed more at marginal rates. And there is disagreement over whether reining in the deficits should be accomplished only by spending cuts or also by revenue increases. Mr. Obama is also still pushing "our roads and our bridges and our railways and our infrastructure," which at least some Republicans have lost patience with at this point. But at least at the rhetorical level, it's a pretty centrist, mainstream approach. No talk from the president this morning about corporate jets or about millionaires and billionaires.

The federal government's light-bulb mandate has been the subject of earlier coverage on this site here, here and here. Now USA Today steps into the story with one of the most slanted pieces of reporting I've seen anywhere. Under the headline, "GOP tries to block eco-friendly light bulbs," the newspaper reports, "The U.S. House is going to try next week to block the federal government's transition from traditional incandescent light bulbs to more energy-efficient options."

If you're in the camp that wants the government to shrink while the private sector grows, today's employment report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, at least the establishment survey section of it, is good news: In June the economy added 57,000 private-sector jobs and shed 39,000 government jobs. If you take the last three months together — April, May, and June — the economy added 371,000 private-sector jobs and shed 111,000 government jobs.

There's a view — call it the Keynesian or neo-Keynesian view — that this is how it is supposed to work. The government picks up some of the slack during a downturn by using its borrowing (and specifically, in the case of the federal government, deficit spending) powers to hire some people. Then, once growth resumes, things return to a more normal state, government shrinks back, and the private sector takes the lead.

All my good contrarian and news instincts (one and the same instinct, actually) want me to rise to the defense of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. as they are embattled and under attack rather than piling on with the herd that is attacking them. But whoever is editing the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the News of the World affair isn't exactly making it easy. Take this paragraph:

Analysts said the closure of News of the World would have a trivial impact on News Corp.'s finances. The paper accounts for significantly less than half of News Corp.'s U.K. publishing operations, which are valued at about $1.3 billion, or 2.8% of News Corp.'s current market cap, according to a person familiar with the matter. News Corp. shares rose almost 2% on the Nasdaq Stock Market Thursday before finishing at $17.43, down four cents.