The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney reports that Bill Delahunt, who left Congress in the beginning of January after serving 14 years as a Democrat representing Massachusetts, will join a firm that announced Mr. Delahunt will "advise clients in highly regulated business environment[s]" and will provide "strategic counsel to firm clients on complex regulatory issues such as healthcare, financial services and energy and environmental matters."

Writes Mr. Carney, who really gets the dynamic at play here:

Of course, Delahunt was one of the people who made "healthcare, financial services, and energy and environmental matters" into "highly regulated business environments" by voting for and championing ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and dozens of other regulatory bills over his years in Congress. Delahunt made government bigger, and big government set the stage for his new lucrative job.

Private-sector job-creation, Washington-style.

One of the nice things about a potential government shutdown (or, for that matter, a big Washington D.C. snowstorm) is the clarity it provides about which government workers are "essential" personnel, who come to work even in a shutdown, and which are "nonessential" personnel, who don't come to work. The question that naturally arises is, if they are nonessential personnel, why are the taxpayers funding their employment to begin with?

Mike Allen's Politico Playbook has details on some nonessential personnel in the Congressional branch of government:

Roll Call's Daniel Newhauser: "Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer, whose office oversees the Senate's doorkeepers, said elevator operators would be among the nonessential staff furloughed … House Administration Committee spokeswoman Salley Wood confirmed that the gym would close, stranding the dozen or so Members who sleep in their offices and rely on the facility's showers."

Newt Gingrich has released the handout from his meeting Thursday with House Republican freshmen, and it includes some points that may be surprising to those who understand him only as a caricature:

1. Do not focus on November 2012. Instead, focus on January 2021. The goal between now and January 2021 should be to govern so well, communicate so clearly, and include Americans from all backgrounds so consistently that a second wave of House Republicans are being sworn in to build a better future around our values and principles.

and, related,

The money manager and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, who was one of my partners in the New York Sun, was on CNBC this morning. The fun part starts at about 7 minutes, 36 seconds in.

National Public Radio's "Planet Money" has a pretty decent piece on "How Do You Create a Job." The reporters interviewed a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, Casey Mulligan, who said three ways to create jobs would be cutting taxes, eliminating regulations like the minimum wage that get in the way of agreements between would-be-workers and potential employers, and reducing unemployment benefits, which reward people for not working. They also interviewed the president of the American Economics Association, Orley Ashenfelter, an economist at Princeton.

The NPR guys seem to have a pretty good grasp of some points that seem to elude a lot of politicians. "In normal times, direct spending by government is not a way to create jobs," they say, also noting that government jobs can come at the expense of private sector jobs. They also observe that President Obama's attempt at "sort of lecturing" companies with cash piles to spend them on hiring more employees "hasn't worked."

The Boston Globe reports: "Health insurance plans to cover city and town employees cost 37 percent more than similar plans for workers at private companies, mostly because municipal employees pay minimal copayments or deductibles when they get care, according to a new statewide survey."

More:

The report, which focused on 14 municipalities, found that city and town workers typically pay only $11 to see their primary care physician, half the amount typically paid by workers in the state, federal, and private sectors.

The report also found that nine of the 14 municipalities studied charge no copayment for most other medical services, including high-tech imaging such as an MRIs, outpatient surgery, and inpatient hospitalization, the three largest drivers of medical cost increases, the report says.

By contrast, private workers pay $75 for high-tech imaging, $150 for outpatient surgery, and $250 for inpatient hospitalization, the report found.

"Hope" is how the blogger and law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced Paul Ryan's tax plan of a 25% top corporate and individual income tax rate to his readers at the Instapundit blog. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial that gushingly describes the plan as "the most serious attempt to reform government in a generation." Sure, 25% would be better than the 35% top rate that now applies to both corporate and individual income. But maybe it's time to dial back the enthusiasm just a bit.

Rep. Paul Ryan has now posted the details of his "Path to Prosperity" budget on the House Budget Committee Web site. The link is here. Highlights from the "full report":

Acute economic hardship was exploited to enact unprecedented expansions of government power.

This did not sit well with the American people. Citizens stood up and demanded that their leaders reacquaint themselves with America's founding ideals of liberty, limited government, and equality under the rule of law.

In recent years, both political parties have squandered the public's trust.The American people ended a unified Republican majority in 2006, just as they ended a unified Democratic majority last fall. Americans reject leaders who focus on the pursuit of power at the expense of principle.

"Google Said to Be Possible Target of U.S. FTC Antitrust Probe" is the headline over a Bloomberg News article that begins, "Google Inc.'s dominance of the Internet-search industry is being considered for a broad antitrust investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, two people familiar with the matter said."

The people "spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still confidential."

This is really something. It'd be one thing if a court found Google guilty of an antitrust violation. It's a second thing if the government files formal antitrust charges against Google in court. It's a third thing if the government is investigating Google. But Bloomberg hangs an entire news article on a fourth thing: the government is considering investigating Google.

Here is a three minute, 15 second Paul Ryan YouTube video about his "Path to Prosperity" budget plan.

I still think, like Mr. Ryan's response to President Obama's State of the Union address, it is too much doom-and-gloom and not enough positive vision about the prosperity and growth possible with a smaller government. But the current path is pretty grim, and maybe Mr. Ryan figures he has to scare the heck out of people if he wants to change the course of government spending, because the forces of inertia and interest groups favoring the current track are so strong.

Paul Ryan has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about his "Path to Prosperity" budget: "A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade."

The Delaware Department of Transportation is cracking down on suburban basketball hoops by ripping them out of people's front yards and carting them away, according to this lively YouTube video.

Russell Feingold, who was a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, has a Web-based petition drive under way calling on President Obama to oust GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as chairman of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

The Hoover Institution has published an essay by Kip Hagopian arguing against a progressive income tax, that is, a tax that imposes higher rates on those with higher incomes. It's a long essay. Readers who don't have the time for the whole thing can just enjoy the opening anecdote about "triplet brothers named Tom, Dick, and Harry Class."

In addition to the tax stuff, the essay is valuable for its treatment of income inequality, the amelioration of which is part of the case for progressive taxation:

For a sense of some of what is at stake in the 2012 presidential and Senate elections, have a look at the Supreme Court's 5-4 opinion rejecting a constitutional challenge to an Arizona program that gives tax credits to those who support "school tuition organizations," which grant scholarships to private schools, including religious schools. From the majority position, by Justice Kennedy, which also attracted Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, while Justices Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor dissented: "Like contributions that lead to charitable tax deductions, contributions yielding STO tax credits are not owed to the State and, in fact, pass directly from tax­ payers to private organizations. Respondents' contrary position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector's hands. That premise finds no basis in standing jurisprudence. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the Arizona State Treasury."