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The Wall Street Journal is on a campaign against private jets. From a front-page article in today's paper:

A Wall Street Journal review of FAA flight records found that dozens of jets operated by publicly traded corporations made 30% or more of their trips to or from resort destinations, sometimes more than 50%. Often, these were places where their top executives own homes. The review covered nearly every jet flight in the U.S. over the four-year period from 2007 to 2010....The high percentage of trips to vacation destinations in a few cases suggests some companies' jets are frequently used by executives to make personal trips. This has stirred doubts among some experts about whether companies are disclosing to shareholders the full amounts spent on personal-jet travel, widely considered the most expensive executive perk.

If you needed any more evidence that California municipal bonds are out of control, this story from the San Jose Mercury News is a classic: The San Mateo County Community College District is using some of the proceeds from a $468 million tax-exempt bond offering to fund a fitness club "available to the larger community on a membership-fee basis." It would "house workout space, locker rooms and a lobby in a model similar to athletic clubs."

Why would anyone need privately owned or operated fitness clubs when the government can build ones financed with tax-exempt bonds?

Marco Rubio, the new Republican senator from Florida, delivered his first floor speech, and it is well worth a look. Highlights:

since her earliest days, America has inspired people from all over the world. Inspired them with the hope that one day their own countries would be one like this one.

Many others decided they could not wait. And so they came here from everywhere, to pursue their dreams and to work to leave their children better off than themselves. And the result was the American miracle.

A miracle where a 16-year-old boy from Sweden came here with no English in his vocabulary and five dollars in his pocket. But he saved enough money to open up a shoe store. Today, that store, Nordstrom, is a multi-billion dollar global retail giant.

A miracle that led to a young couple with no money and no business experience to open up a toy company out of the garage of their home. Today, that company, Mattel, is one of the world's largest toy manufacturers.

President Obama earlier this week spoke at a meeting of his Jobs and Competitiveness Council, the one led by GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. The event was held in North Carolina, at Cree, a company in the light-emitting diode business. Mr. Obama, in his remarks, made one of his classic ads for an individual company:

I know that one of the things that people may be wondering about, at least the press who've traveled with me as opposed to the folks who have been down here for the last day, is why are we here at Cree? This is an example of the kind of company that I think all of us want to see being promoted all across the country. This is a company that is specializing in LED lighting, has been extraordinarily effective in driving down the costs of high-efficiency lighting that is, over time, I think going to make a huge difference, not just for businesses who use the technology, but also for a country that needs to figure out how do we operate in a more energy-efficient way.

"Let The Jobs Trickle Down Again: Desperate to attack unemployment, will Democrats rethink supply-side" is the headline over my column in the Daily News. The link to read the full column is here.

Thoughts on the first big New Hampshire presidential debate of this election cycle, just concluded:

CNN's John King, the moderator, was a real disappointment. What are the Republican candidates and the Manchester Union Leader doing turning the debate over to a journalist who seems so clearly out to embarrass them or drive them off message. Mr. King's questioning about the economy was largely devoted to grilling the candidates about whether Governor Pawlenty's 5% growth target was "too optimistic." He asked pointedly at one juncture that if tax cuts create jobs, "where were the jobs" after President George W. Bush's tax cuts. He asked the candidates if Republicans were demonizing public employees. He asked not a word about Iran's nuclear ambitions or the regime in Syria, but spent a long time on gay marriage, gays in the military, and abortion. He wasted valuable debate time with trivialities, asking Governor Pawlenty whether he preferred Coke or Pepsi and asking Governor Romney whether he liked his barbecue spicy or mild. (The answers were Coke and spicy.)

Lawrence Summers, back at Harvard after a stint as an economic aide to President Obama, suggests extending the two percentage point reduction in the payroll tax currently in place to three percentage points and also having it apply to the employer's share of the payroll tax. At least I think that's what he's suggesting. Here's the sentence: "Stimulus should be continued and indeed expanded by providing the payroll tax cut to employers as well as employees. Raising the share of payroll from 2 per cent to 3 per cent is desirable, too."

It's not clear to me whether he means three percentage points each from the employer's half and from the employee's half or three percentage points total. Either way, it's something to remember the next time you hear Democrats denounce Republicans as irresponsible for proposing tax cuts at a time of deficits.

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby has a column taking a skeptical look at proposals by some Massachusetts lawmakers to provide special tax breaks to companies in the video game industry: "For years the state has played this sucker's game of allocating financial benefits — grants, credits, and other tax breaks — to politically favored companies and industries....Beacon Hill's confidence in its ability to successfully pick marketplace winners and losers is boundless."

Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a cover story with "ways for the U.S. to shore up its economy," among them, the suggestion that America import from Canada the idea of a 5% national sales tax.

A post here the other day observed, "First Rep. Paul Ryan suggested cutting the top federal corporate tax rate to 25% from 35%. Then Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty suggested 15%. Now another Republican running for president, Newt Gingrich, is out with a piece calling for cutting the corporate tax rate to 12.5%."

Now the Wall Street Journal has an interview with a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, who is on the verge of a presidential run: "In my perfect world," she explains, "we'd take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we're the most competitive in the industrialized world."

Will anyone go lower than 9%?

Senator Lieberman of Connecticut, who less than a year ago was declaring, "I don't think it makes sense to raise any federal taxes during the uncertain economy we are struggling through. The more money we leave in private hands, the quicker our economic recovery will be," now is proposing "that higher-income Americans pay an additional 1 percent of every dollar they earn over $250,000" as a tax to fund Medicare.

The ObamaCare bill that Mr. Lieberman supported on final passage already includes a 3.8% tax on "unearned income" — i.e., dividends, capital gains — on this same group of upper-income earners. The independent Democrat now wants to pile yet more taxes on them to pay for health care?

Virginia Postrel devotes her Bloomberg column to the light bulb issue: "It was crony capitalism with a touch of green."

More: "Though sponsored largely by Democrats, the ban was a bipartisan effort. It never would have become law without support from Republican senators and the signature of President Bush. Through filibuster and veto threats, Republicans got other changes in the 2007 energy bill -- changes that had vocal corporate constituencies -- but they didn't fight the light bulb ban."

It's a really excellent column all the way through. And well-timed — though Ms. Postrel doesn't mention it, President Obama is reportedly headed Monday for "Durham, N.C., where he will meet with the Jobs and Competitiveness Council at the corporate and U.S. manufacturing headquarters of Cree, a leading manufacturer of energy efficient LED lighting."

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial kvelling about the "remarkable" "success" of Texas in job creation, attributing the growth to the state's "free market and business-friendly climate." It all makes fine sense, covering terrain surveyed here earlier in the review of Governor Perry's book and in the post on Michael Barone's Texas boom column. The money paragraph, though, is right here:

Texan construction employment has contracted by 2.3% since the end of the recession, along with manufacturing (a 1.8% decline) and information (-8.4%). But growth in other areas has surpassed these losses. Professional and business services accounted for 22.9% of the total jobs added, health care for 30.5% and trade and energy for 10.6%.

The Federal Communications Commission has released its final report on "Information Needs of Communities." This is different from the Federal Trade Commission staff report, which came out a year ago and which attracted some attention here for its suggestion of "a 5% tax on consumer electronics, and a 2% sales tax on advertising" to fund "citizenship news vouchers" that would give every American tax money to allocate to non-profit news organizations of their choice. The FCC, by contrast, recommends a more restrained approach: "Most of the solutions to today's media problems will be found by entrepreneurs, reporters, and creative citizens, not legislators or agencies. Government cannot 'save journalism.' Indeed, the media landscape is evolving so rapidly that heavy-handed regulatory intervention dictating media company behavior could backfire, distorting markets in unhelpful ways. "