The top story at Yahoo! News this morning is a piece from Time magazine by Joe Klein asserting of President Obama's budget speech, "the President did add a crucial element to the debate: a sense of proportion and sanity."

Might it be possible for Time magazine to disagree with Rep. Paul Ryan about federal budget policy without accusing him of being insane?

From the Wall Street Journal's editorial on the president's budget speech comes this fact: "According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn't cover Mr. Obama's deficit for this year."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, writing at Ricochet.com about the class-action lawsuit by unpaid Huffington Post bloggers seeking compensation retroactively for their work now that the site has been sold to AOL for hundreds of millions of dollars:

what do we have here? A group of highly intelligent bloggers all of whom have made the decision that they prefer the exposure that the HuffPo affords them to payment from some lesser outfit. There is no way that a common law theory of restitution can override those voluntary choices. The authors have decided that the nonpecuniary benefits outweigh any prospect of financial gain. The tragedy is that busybodies like Tasini are so imperious that they cannot let sensible people make their own choices. This suit should be tossed out on its ear.

President Obama began his remarks at George Washington University by striking an odd note for a president fighting to defend Pell Grants. "I wanted to make sure that all of you could have one more excuse to skip class. You're welcome," he joked.

Then he went on to strike an odd note for a president aiming to actually get a deficit reduction deal through Congress. He acknowledged Vice President Biden, Secretary Geithner, and White House aides Jacob Lew and Gene Sperling by name, but did not name the members of the legislative branch, referring only to the presence of "a number of members of Congress here."

It went pretty much downhill from there.

As in past speeches, he made a nod to "free markets and free enterprise" as the engine of American growth, along with "self-reliant" Americans having "a healthy skepticism of too much government." But it was only a nod, a prelude to a long list of government programs — "public schools and universities," "railroads," "highways," Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Medicaid. "We would not be a great country without those commitments," he said.

The Manhattan Institute's E.J. McMahon notices Crain's list of the largest employers in New York City:

In order of full-time equivalent headcount, Crain's ranked employers as follows:

1. City of New York (excl schools) — 152,836
2. NYC Department of Education — 121,255
3. Metropolitan Transportation Authority — 66,240
4. Federal government — 52,800
5. NYC Health and Hospitals Corp. — 36,964
6. State of New York — 26,500

Another 20 percent of large employers were in the health care sector, which is heavily dependent on government subsidies, Crain's noted. Also not counted in the government category was the City of University of New York (CUNY). Adding CUNY and the health care sector to the top six on the list would raise the government and quasi-government share of large employers in the city to more than 70 percent.

One of the many valuable services provided by FutureOfCapitalism.com is keeping track of the tax increases supported by the New York Times. The newspaper adds to the list today, asserting in an editorial, "The middle class is also going to have to pay higher taxes…That means higher income taxes further down the income scale than Mr. Obama has previously called for, and new sources of tax revenue, like energy taxes or a financial-transactions tax or a value-added tax."

This, by our count, brings the total number of tax increases supported by the Times editorial columns to sixteen (income taxes plus "new sources" suggests at least three separate tax increases).

As a reminder, here are the previous 13 on the list

The Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and Washington Post all have coverage of a conference in Dallas organized by the George W. Bush Institute on the topic of how to get America's GDP growing at 4%.

The AP article that runs in the Washington Post quotes President Bush as saying, "Obviously we have to be somewhat optimistic to aim for an aspirational target of 4 percent." Well, that's one way of looking at it. But if one recalls that President Kennedy aimed for 5% growth and got it, one might think that holding out 4% as an "optimistic...aspirational target" is actually yielding to what one politician once called, in a memorable phrase, "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

Senator McCain and Senator Kerry are teaming up to introduce the "Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011," which, a press release from Senator McCain explains, would empower "State Attorneys General and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce the bill's provisions." As if the state attorneys general and the FTC didn't already have enough pretexts on which to hassle businesses.

The text of the bill identifies such items as "date of birth" and "the religious affiliation of an individual" as "personally identifiable information" and "sensitive personally identifiable information," meaning that such useful Web sites as Wikipedia and whorunsgov.com might be ensnared, violating the First Amendment, which Senator McCain has never had much deference for anyway.

Wall Street Journal columnist Dennis Berman has responded to my inquiry asking him to justify of his use of lying as a reporting technique (see the earlier post), sending the following statement:

As you can appreciate, the integrity of these markets is based in part on honest disclosures by both buyers and sellers. My intent was to probe the strengths and weaknesses of a system that relies almost exclusively on buyers' own disclosures for establishing whether they are "accredited." That self-reporting standard enabled my grandmother to slip through. So might other people with intent to dodge the rules.

My approach and objectives were discussed in detail with the companies prior to publication. As you can see, the story also praises SharesPost for cutting off my access.

A professor of economics at George Mason University, Donald Boudreaux, has a column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review explaining that incentives don't explain everything: culture also matters. He writes, "Our modern standard of living was sparked by a major cultural change that occurred only a few generations back. That cultural change -- happening first in the Netherlands and soon afterward in Britain -- was a change in people's attitude toward the bourgeoisie. Merchants, innovators and business people came to be, for the first time in human history, not only tolerated but respected."

The column is based on Deirdre McCloskey's book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World, which Professor Boudreaux calls "magnificent" and "the most important book I've read this millennium."

Koch Industries is asking the New York Times for a correction of an op-ed piece it published on April 3. Newsbusters.org has details.

Thomas Sowell's spending cut plan targets Reverse Robin-Hoods: "My plan would start by cutting off all government transfer payments to billionaires." He mentions farm subsidies and "green" energy gravy.

Also, "Social Security and Medicare are supposed to be among the most difficult programs to cut without ruinous political consequences. However, it is not necessary to attack all the spending on these programs in order to make big savings. Instead of attacking these programs as a whole, what is far more vulnerable is the compulsory aspect of these programs." Allow people to opt out.

"New York Fed Lures Wall Street Bids on Once-Toxic Mortgage Debt" is the headline over a Bloomberg Government article. The article is behind a hard paywall, but the headline tells the story and prompts the questions: What happened? Did they give the securities some kind of de-toxification? Change the terms?

No.

"Toxic" was simply a pejorative term applied to securities by the press and public officials to refer to securities that had declined in value that they didn't understand or that they believed were poor investments.

In fact, enormous decisions were prescribed based on mark-to-market rules that were inappropriate or didn't even exist for regulatory capital purposes.

It turns out that hundreds of billions of dollars of "toxic" securities were in fact paid off as scheduled and otherwise had spectacular returns from depressed pricing levels. Those depressed prices were exacerbated by rhetoric and misguided policies that forced selling of these securities and discouraged buying, creating illiquidity and regulatory-related uncertainty.

When I objected to Project Veritas's entrapment of NPR because the conservative provocateurs were lying about their own identities, the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto acknowledged, "the techniques in question do not meet the ethical standards of elite journalistic institutions, including of course The Wall Street Journal."

So it'll be interesting to see what the great Taranto makes of a column in today's Journal by Dennis Berman, an editor at the paper. The column recounts how Mr. Berman lied to a company, SharesPost, to set up an account in the name of his dead grandmother. He writes, "Relying on erroneous information that I, as a test, submitted under her name, SharesPost let Grandma into its realm, where only sophisticated individuals and institutions are supposed to swap shares, according to Securities and Exchange Commission rules." More: "On SharesPost's bulletin board for Groupon—which also allowed me passage with a few financial fibs—users gripe about how hard it is to find shares."

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, writing in the Spring issue of National Affairs:

people concerned for their freedom and rights are always most alert to threats that arise when governments (or other powerful institutions) force us to do what we don't want to do. The power of coercion is more easy to define, to identify, and to resist. But we are not sufficiently alert to the flip side of this problem: the risks that come with the power to create exceptions and to grant dispensations. Indeed, this is a much more subtle, insidious assault by government: Rather than setting the state and the private sector against each other in a healthy tension, it fuses them, making the private sphere dependent on the government's benevolence. And when currying the favor of capricious government officials is required for a person's well-being or a firm's very existence, government abuse becomes nearly impossible to oppose.

"Government by waiver" is thus among the most serious challenges to the rule of law in our time.