Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, is faulting House Republicans for not going far enough in cutting earmark spending, USA Today reports: "Many in Congress promised taxpayers a full earmark moratorium, not a half moratorium," the paper quotes Senator Coburn as saying. "Protecting nearly $5 billion in earmarks from cuts sends the wrong message to taxpayers." Among the earmarks that did not get cut were $20 million for a World War II museum in New Orleans.

The New York Times' technology columnist has a review of six different Bluetooth wireless speakers that includes this baffling sentence: "Bose also makes a Bluetooth wireless speaker, but it declined to participate in this review."

What does that mean in plain English? The Times decided to review Bluetooth wireless speakers, but it only would write about the companies that would give free samples of their products to the New York Times? The Times decided to review Bluetooth wireless speakers, but the reviewer was too lazy or too busy to go buy a Bose speaker and return it to the store after reviewing it? The Times decided to review Bluetooth wireless speakers, but it didn't have the budget to test a Bose speaker? The Times technology column leaves it up to the technology companies, rather than up to the editors, whether products will be written about in the paper? Imagine if the paper handled movie or book or restaurant reviews, or news coverage in general, on the same principle.

As a general proposition I think America needs more legal immigrants, not fewer, and that the laws should be changed so that it's easier for people who want to come here and work and become Americans to do that. But as a legal approach, the idea reportedly championed by New York State senators Bill Perkins and Daniel Squadron — New York legislation providing illegal immigrants "work opportunities with the State of New York" — seems the wrong way to start, especially at a time when New York is facing both a higher-than-usual unemployment rate and a worse-than-usual state budget gap. I suppose this marks a kind of evolutionary progress for the Democratic Party — instead of wanting unlimited welfare for illegal immigrants, it now wants to make the illegal immigrants state government employees. Presumably, they will then be able to join government employee unions, which will then participate in politics in favor of the Democrats.

Stanford University economist Michael Boskin reports from California: "The unemployment rate, at 12.4%, is higher than in every other state except Nevada....With 12% of America's population, California accounts for more than 31% of its public-assistance recipients....California's government collects about one-half of its income-tax revenue from the top 1% of the state's taxpayers. But the system's extreme progressivity makes proceeds so volatile that the state continually experiences boom-bust cycles of rapidly rising revenue, inevitably followed by collapse....It's a complex picture, but at its core is a high-tax welfare state run amok."

The "Life With DeKalb Turbines" blog has some dramatic photographs of a windmill blade that shattered in midair during operation, spraying shrapnel nearby.

No energy technology is without its risks, and in some cases the rewards outweigh the risks. Still, the risks of oil and nuclear energy are well known, while the risks of some of these other technologies are still being learned about. The technology will probably improve over time, but that's not much consolation if your tax dollars are being taken from you to subsidize a turbine that's shattering and spraying shrapnel.

Leading figures in supply-side economics are heading into the 2012 election sharply divided over the future direction and emphasis of the movement, with one faction pushing for Reagan-style tax rate cuts while another faction advises a focus on a sound dollar, including a return to a gold standard.

That was the news out of a conference in New York on Tuesday that was part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. Convened by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal, the event featured remarks by Reagan aides and advisers including Lawrence Lindsey, Lewis Lehrman, Arthur Laffer, and Lawrence Kudlow as well as comments by a Nobel laureate economist, Robert Mundell.

A trustee of the Reagan Foundation, the publishing executive and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, pointed out in his opening remarks that the debate within the supply-side camp between gold-standard advocates and those who felt the monetary supply could be managed was "never really resolved."

Vitaliy Katsenelson has a dispatch on a talk by the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Thomas Hoenig:

It is a fundamental tenet of American capitalism that central planning of economies doesn't work in the long term, whether in Soviet Union historically or in China today. But I often wonder: How is the Fed's Board of Governors – the proverbial 12 guys in a room – any different than the 24 guys in a room who make up the Chinese politburo? The non-democratic Chinese may have a few more levers to push – an ability to force banks to lend, for example – but short of that, how is the Fed's micromanagement of interest rates any different from China's? After Hoenig came off the stage, I posed the question to Hoenig, and I asked him point-blank whether the Federal Reserve is an anti-capitalistic entity.

To my shock, Hoenig agreed with me: The Fed is anti-capitalistic.

Thomas Sowell has a new column of "random thoughts," among them:

The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be "materialistic" and "greedy" to want to keep what you have earned. But it is "idealistic" to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.

The economics columnist David Warsh, who is a friend of mine, has a column criticizing as too right-wing an Economist survey on government power that I thought was too left-wing. The best part of the Warsh column is the beginning:

I'm as susceptible as the next guy to lashing out at the nanny state. The jigging around of Daylight Savings Time over the last twenty-five years is my latest peeve. For a quarter-century after 1962, DST (what the British call Summer Time) began the last Sunday in April and ended the last Sunday in October. For the next fifteen years, it began the first Sunday in April. Now we move our clocks ahead the second Sunday in March and don't set them back until the first Sunday in November. Europe waits until the end of March.

Dependable time and stable money are among government's most fundamental responsibilities. Changing the calendar periodically to suit lobbying interests and bureaucratic enthusiasms is a bad idea.

David Stockman isn't right about everything (he wants to raise taxes, for example) but he's still worth paying some attention to. The Von Mises Institute recently posted his 2011 Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, titled, "The End of Sound Money and the Triumph of Crony Capitalism." The full text is here. Highlights: "the carnage on Wall Street in September 2008 was the inevitable crash of a 40-year financial bubble spawned by the Fed after Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971....faced with the collapse of their own handiwork, Washington panicked and joined the Fed in unleashing an indiscriminate bailout capitalism that has now thoroughly corrupted the halls of government, even as it has become a debilitating blight on the free market."

He's got a whole section in there on GE Capital's role in the financial crisis, including a reference to GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as "the nation's number one crony capitalist."

The CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, who appeared at the White House as a supporter of ObamaCare, now is airing his doubts, the Weekly Standard notices. From an interview with Mr. Schultz in the Seattle Times: "I think as the bill is currently written and if it was going to land in 2014 under the current guidelines, the pressure on small businesses, because of the mandate, is too great."

From a Wall Street Journal interview with Microsoft founder Bill Gates:

Q: Do we need to increase taxes to spend more on education?

A: The only way to make the overall equation work involves some increased taxation and some cuts in spending....

"The Road to Nuclear Hell," is the headline of libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's article on nuclear energy, published on the Web site of the Hoover Institution. The high cost of nuclear energy, he says, "is not a function of the construction costs of new nuclear facilities. It is a direct consequence of the grotesque permitting and regulatory structure that is put into place to supervise—make that guard against—the construction of new nuclear facilities in the United States." Since newer facilities tend to be safer than old ones, the regulatory delays and barriers actually make nuclear energy more risky than it needs to be, he writes.

Amity Shlaes has a column on what she calls "the pathology of college narcissism," concluding that the race to get into, and pay for, fancy colleges isn't about the students, but about the parents, who "want the rear-window decal on the car for themselves."

A Wall Street Journal editorial on Sarbanes-Oxley "relief" carries this passage:

"Our members are working on improvements and exemptions," says a House Republican aide about potential Sarbox reform.

That is not reassuring. Never mind the improvements and exemptions — why not just repeal the whole thing, like ObamaCare?

Of course "exemptions" sets up a race for various categories of businesses to hire ex-congressional-aides and ex-Congressmen (ex-cons?) as lobbyists to plead for exemptions, and to make campaign contributions in search of such exemptions. And the "improvements" create more work for the lawyers and accountants to have companies that have finally, at great cost, figured out how to comply with the existing law, to start all over again figuring out how to comply with the "improvements."

At the risk of sounding cynical, at a certain point one starts to wonder whether either political party is interested in passing growth-friendly laws, or if they are just interested in having an issue they can milk.