The Boston Globe reports:

Revenue Commissioner Navjeet K. Bal told lawmakers that special interest tax breaks to the film, life sciences, manufacturing, and mutual fund industries currently add up to nearly $400 million annually.

Why not treat all industries the same? The politicians wouldn't like that because then the businesses wouldn't need to make as many campaign contributions or hire as many ex-politicians as lobbyists to get the special tax breaks. But the government isn't that good at choosing which industries to favor, and it seems somehow unjust that taxes would be based on a company or industry's skill at government relations rather than on its underlying economic activity.

The Worcester Telegram has more from a Massachusetts state Senate hearing called in response to news that Fidelity is moving 1,000 jobs to Rhode Island and New Hampshire from Massachusetts:

Following up the October 2006 New York Sun editorial "Reid of the Ritz" and the February 2010 FutureOfCapitalism post Governor Paterson at the Ritz, the Arizona Republic has a report on Arizona state lawmakers who accepted free football tickets and out-of-state travel paid for by the Fiesta Bowl, which had interest in legislation:

Fiesta Bowl employees went on at least seven trips with politicians in recent years and lists more than a dozen former and current state lawmakers, including Sen. President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, who joined lobbyists and bowl representatives for football weekends in Chicago and Boston.

The Fiesta Bowl spent $18,454 on the October 2005 Chicago trip and more than $65,000 on the October 2008 Boston trip.

Seth Lipsky has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on the case of Bernard von NotHaus, convicted of counterfeiting for issuing gold "Liberty Dollars." Writes Mr. Lipsky: "Certainly it's a loser's game to suppress private money that is sound in order to protect government-issued money that is unsound."

In his speech to the nation about Libya, President Obama repeatedly dwelled on his insistence that American "ground troops" not go to Libya. He said: " I said that America's role would be limited; that we would not put ground troops into Libya...Tonight, we are fulfilling that pledge....We also had the ability to stop Qaddafi's forces in their tracks without putting American troops on the ground....If we tried to overthrow Qaddafi by force, our coalition would splinter. We would likely have to put U.S. troops on the ground to accomplish that mission."

Now NPR reports: "The CIA has sent a small, covert team into rebel-held eastern Libya while the White House debates whether to arm the opposition, NPR has confirmed. The operatives are in Libya to gather intelligence to help direct NATO airstrikes and to help train inexperienced rebel fighters."

"Did the Obama Administration Play Favorites With Energy Loans?" is the headline over an ABC News piece that begins:

When the White House announced the federal government would loan $465 million to Tesla, a California start-up company with plans to develop an all-electric sedan, President Obama called it an "historic opportunity to ensure that the next generation of fuel-efficient cars and trucks are made in America."

The loan also represented a lucrative opportunity for Steve Westly, a major investor in the car company who had raised more than $500,000 for the president's campaign.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy lent more than half a billion dollars to companies backed by Westly's California venture capital firm. In 2010, the White House tapped Westly for a seat on a special energy advisory panel that gives him regular access to Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Westly boasts on his website that his firm is "uniquely positioned" to take advantage of the Obama administration's interest in green energy.

Yuval Levin, writing in the Spring issue of National Affairs:

All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. Sustaining existing programs of social insurance, let alone continuing to build new ones on the social-democratic model, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and projections for the coming decades paint an impossibly grim and baleful picture. There is simply no way that Europe, Japan, or America can actually go where the economists' long-term charts now point — to debts that utterly overwhelm their productive capacities, governments that do almost nothing but support the elderly, and economies with no room for dynamism, for growth, or for youth. Some change must come, and so it will.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's book Idea Man is excerpted in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair. The link to the excerpt is here. Most of the press coverage (like this Wall Street Journal story) focuses on the negative aspects: "Bill Gates schemed to take shares in Microsoft Corp. from his co-founder during the early days of the software company following his partner's treatment for cancer," is the way the Journal article begins.

But what is striking to me in the excerpt is the way the early days of Microsoft — which created the fortune that for a time made Bill Gates the richest person in America — fit not the negative stereotypes of capitalists or rich people or entrepreneurs ("taking" from cancer victims) but the positive ones.

USA Today reports: "Speaking to several Democratic colleagues Tuesday, Sen. Charles Schumer, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate, said they should all use the word 'extreme' when describing the budget cuts that Tea Party Republicans were seeking in the ongoing budget negotiations."

This is the world of Mr. Schumer and the Washington Democrats: It's "extreme" to cut $60 billion out of a $3.8 trillion federal budget. That's about a 1.6% cut. Some might describe as "extreme" the increase in the federal budget — to $3.819 trillion in 2011 from $2.655 trillion in 2006 — that has occurred since Mr. Schumer and his Democratic colleagues took control of the Senate in the 2006 election. That's an increase of 44%. This is Washington Democratic math for you: increase spending by 44%, then denounce a 1.6% cut as "extreme."

USA Today has an editorial calling for simplifying the corporate tax code:

the reality is that all taxes are ultimately paid by individuals. The shareholders and owners of companies pay corporate taxes indirectly in form of smaller dividends and depressed stock valuations. Consumers pay through price increases.

Rather than turning the debate on corporate taxes into the same tired struggle of the rich against everyone else, it should focus on making U.S. companies more competitive. Those companies now have the choice between paying some of the highest rates in the world or devising tax avoidance schemes, both of which move investment abroad and take their attention away from producing great goods and services.

Michael Barone notices that in the latest Case-Shiller housing index numbers, housing prices are down year-over-year in 18 of 20 markets surveyed. The big exception? Washington, D.C., which is up 3.6%. As Mr. Barone puts it, "we in Washington have this thing called the federal government, which demands that you send it as much of your money as it wants and will put you in jail if you refuse to do so."

Well, it'll put you in jail, unless you're Andrew Stein.

It's starting to look as though that special tax break for Twitter in San Francisco could — could — be the start of a broader effort to roll back taxes in San Francisco. TechCrunch reports:

The goal isn't a mere concession or two for the big boys. It isn't a two-year payroll tax deferral either. David Chiu, President of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, is aiming for a near term agreement to take taxing startup stock options off the table completely and a goal over the next two years of repealing the payroll tax as it stands now– completely.

The "most read" story on the Marketwatch Web site at the moment is a column advising, "tax the Super Rich. Tax them now. Before the other 99% rise up, trigger a new American Revolution, a meltdown and the Great Depression 2." More:

In a New York Times column, Matthew Klein, a 24-year-old Council on Foreign Relations researcher, draws a parallel between the 25% unemployment among Egypt's young revolutionaries and the 21% for young American workers...."How much longer until the rest of the rich world" explodes like Egypt?

The American Enterprise Institute's Alex Pollock offers some historical context on the behavior of the New York municipal labor unions and bankers in the debt crisis of the 1970s: "if you think the antics of the Wisconsin public employee unions were something new, they were not."

The editor of the Liberty and Economics Review, Nick Sorrentino, is optimistic about the next generation. He writes:

the new kids are finding interesting and new ways to do business. These folks are America's best hope. The next wave of entrepreneurs have the potential to much good for America and for the world.

I see so much potential in the young people of the world who understand markets on a fundamental level. They have grown up with voting videos and articles up or down. They understand the nature of spontaneous order, and understand that it is not something to fear. It's in their DNA.

Perhaps over time this generation which is just starting to come into its own will embrace a free economy as a more just and sustainable route to prosperity.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit that supports entrepreneurship, has a new report out by Paul Kedrosky and Dane Stangler headlined "Financialization and Its Entrepreneurial Consequences." According to the foundation's press release about the study, the growing size of the financial industry in America "potentially suppressed entrepreneurship."

The release quotes Mr. Kedrosky as saying that the financial companies were hiring people who otherwise might have started their own companies. "The financial services industry's steady rise has had a cannibalizing effect on entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy," he is quoted as saying. "Excessive financialization exacerbated and distorted the flow of capital in the economy, potentially suppressing entrepreneurship by drawing away entrepreneurial talent."