Stephen Moore has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about President Obama's claim that rich people want to pay more taxes. He writes: "When taxpayer groups in Massachusetts won an income tax rate cut to 5.3% from 5.85% in 2001, they created an option for those opposed to the cut to file at the old rate. But according to Massachusetts tax records, each year only about 1,000 tax-me-more enthusiasts—fewer than 0.1% of the state's residents—choose the optional higher tax rate. The total raised in voluntary tax contributions for the past tax year was a pitiful $69,000...when liberals say they want higher taxes, they mean on you."

A good use of one of your 20 free articles on NYTimes.com this month might be reading my old Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein's op-ed, which appears under the headline, "Raise Taxes, but Not Tax Rates." He writes:

tax revenues can be increased substantially by limiting the deductions, credits and exclusions that are essentially government spending by another name.

Tax credits for buying solar panels or hybrid cars are just like government spending to subsidize those purchases. Similarly, the exclusion from employees' taxable incomes of employer payments for health insurance is no different from subsidizing the purchase of those insurance policies. The deduction for interest on residential mortgages, probably the best-known tax expenditure, amounts to a giant subsidy for homeownership.

At their worst, such tax expenditures create incentives for wasteful borrowing and spending; they have been factors in the mortgage crisis and the rising cost of health care.

Bloomberg News has a pretty interesting look at how much control donors to some colleges and universities are getting in exchange for their gifts. The lead anecdote is John Allison, who has gotten Ayn Rand's work taught in a lot of colleges. Such arrangements are almost certainly better than the alternative, which is that the colleges take donor money and use it to support things that the donor opposes. But the deals also raise questions of the sort that former Bush administration official Noam Neusner wrote about the other day: if charities are just another form of conspicuous consumption for which the donor is receiving something of value in return, why do they get a tax break? Daniel Henninger's suggestion last week — "Eliminate the charitable deduction, drop—or flatten—the top tax rate and total giving will rise, not fall" — was an intriguing one.

Bloomberg News notices that Google is advertising for an antitrust lawyer. More:

Google hired Stewart Jeffries, formerly an antitrust counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, at its Washington office in February. Sara Walsh joined Google's competition team at headquarters from the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati in New York in October, according to her Linkedin profile.

"We've been steadily hiring lawyers in all areas," said Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich.

Nothing against lawyers, who include some fine folk and who perform some valuable functions in our society. But what's be better for Google's long-term growth and for the American economy — if the company were hiring programmers or software engineers to build new products or improve its existing ones, or if the company is instead hiring antitrust lawyers to fight with government antitrust lawyers?

Disclosure: I own some shares of Google.

Bloomberg News's Caroline Baum writes: "The federal government has exceeded its "enumerated powers" as outlined in Article 1, Section 8, to such a degree it's become an unrecognizable, unmanageable behemoth, with tentacles reaching into all facets of our lives."

How about this for the chart of the day?:

"Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism will bestow its highest honor, the Columbia Journalism Award, to Al Jazeera English. The award is given annually during the school's commencement ceremony to recognize an individual or organization for 'singular journalism in the public interest,'" a Columbia Journalism School press release announces.

The latest gem from the Al Jazeera English Web site is a news article about the death of Osama bin Laden headlined "Formenting Nationalism With Murder." It's not clear whether the "murder" meant by the headline is that committed by Bin Laden or the action taken by U.S. forces in Pakistan, but, to judge by the tone of the article, it may well be the latter:

However, many Muslims in the US believe the event will not likely function to dispel stereotyping and bigotry against Arabs and Muslims.

The League of Women Voters is airing an attack ad against Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts for voting against a carbon tax. The ad features a mother with a child breathing in a mask. The Worcester Telegram & Gazette has an editorial with details calling the ad "nonsense" and calling for it to be withdrawn.

From a Bloomberg News column by Rory Lancman, a Democrat who is a member of the New York State Assembly, about the Martin Act that New York attorney generals use against the financial services industry:

The Martin Act empowers only the attorney general to bring securities cases. Worse, courts are shutting down traditional state common-law negligence claims brought against securities-market participants, on the theory that the Martin Act, in granting exclusive authority to the attorney general, was intended to prevent lawsuits by private investors....That's why the deputy majority leader of the state Senate, Republican Tom Libous, and I have proposed legislation that would authorize pension funds to sue for damages that result from violations of the act.

From the Census Bureau's required "organizational and practices" survey, out today:

Question 1: In 2005 and 2010, what best describes what happened at this establishment when a problem in production process arose? Examples finding a quality defect in a product or piece of machinery breaking down.

Answer choices:

We fixed it but did not take further action

We fixed it and took action to make sure it did not happen again

We fixed it and took action to make sure it did not happen again, and had a
continuous improvement process to anticipate problems like these in advance

No action was taken

Tough choice there between the first and the last. Maybe they should add a fifth choice, "We didn't even notice the quality defect because we were too busy answering questions from the government, which thinks it knows better than us how to run our business."

The Department of Justice's civil fraud lawsuit against MortgageIt and Deutsche Bank seeking upwards of $2 billion struck me as newsworthy on at least two counts.

First, during the period in which Deutsche Bank's MortgageIt unit was allegedly defrauding the government and during which Deutsche Bank acquired the allegedly fraudulent mortgage unit for $430 million, a top in-house lawyer at Deutsche Bank was Robert Khuzami, who is now the director of enforcement at the SEC. Mr. Khuzami is not named in the suit or accused of any wrongdoing, but it sure will be interesting to see whether he had any role in the acquisition or in the transactions at issue.

From a Wall Street Journal news article today headlined "High-Earning Households Pay Growing Share of Taxes":

Average pretax incomes for the top 20% grew from $140,300 in 1979 to $264,700 in 2007, in inflation-adjusted dollars; for the top 10%, they grew from $182,800 in 1979 to $394,500 in 2007 according to the Congressional Budget Office

USA Today has been doing some really fine work on government pay. The latest example is an article today reporting that there are "at least 17,828 federal employees whose annualized salaries totaled $180,000 or more in September 2010." More: "their ranks soared from the 805 with annualized salaries of $180,000 or more in 2005."

Among the 17,828 federal employees earning $180,000 a year or more are 598 SEC lawyers and 12,708 doctors at the Veterans Administration.

Then there's this:

James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that promotes conservative public policies, said many of the high-paid federal jobs are not overpaid — and may be underpaid — in comparison with the private sector.

Amity Shlaes has a Bloomberg column digging into the details of the new Gramm-Rudman being discussed as part of a budget deal:

More important though is to decide what the goal here is, mere budget balancing or government cutting. A new constraint mechanism that includes tax increases may indeed check government growth, or even shrink it. Such a trigger plan, however, may also allow the House and Senate to prance around claiming they are demonstrating discipline even as they expand government. It is, after all, possible to maintain a large balanced budget. My preference would be for a mechanism whose sole aim is to make government smaller, where any spending increases triggered spending cuts of double the size.

The same beneficent "shield" effect that Gramm describes in relation to budget cuts would here, in relation to tax rate increases, work perniciously. Congressmen would be able to say raising taxes wasn't their fault, and therefore would find them easier to permit.

The Wall Street Journal has a nifty news article about the amount of paper generated in Washington by Dodd-Frank-related rulemaking. "The process has produced more than three million words in the Federal Register—or more than 3,500 11-inch-high pages," which the Journal says laid end-to-end would be the equivalent of 2.6 Empire State Buildings. "And about 62% of the 387 sets of rules required by the law haven't even been proposed, according to law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell."

Imagine the number of lawyers and lobbyists a company has to pay to attempt to keep track of all this stuff.