Mickey Kaus, who has moved his blog over to the Daily Caller from Newsweek (where it went after leaving Slate for the Web Site of his California U.S. Senate challenge to Barbara Boxer in the Democratic primary), has some thoughts about General Motors.

The New York Times has an editorial praising the Supreme Court's ruling that anti-gay protests at military funerals are speech protected under the First Amendment. Other Times editorials in the past have taken the position that the First Amendment protects both "animal cruelty videos" that include "depictions of animals being crushed or mutilated" and also "the sale of violent video games to minors." The Times has also, in the past, said that the First Amendment should allow Americans to provide "material support" to terrorist groups.

It looks like those warning that the next target for the tax-increasers after carried interest would be founders' stock were correct. The Tax Prof blog reports on a presentation at Stanford Law School in which a law professor's article "questions the prevailing view that we should tax founders at a low rate" and argues, "Taxing founders at a low rate is a conspicuous loophole in the fabric of our progressive income tax system, uniquely undermining our shared commitment to equal opportunity and distributive justice." More: "it would be normatively desirable to eliminate the tax subsidy and instead tax gains from founders' stock at the same rate as labor income."

Bloomberg News Washington tax reporter Ryan Donmoyer has left the wire service to go work for accounting firm Ernst & Young, the latest example of the journalism revolving door. Mr. Donmoyer's work for Bloomberg has been the subject of considerable criticism on this Web site (see here, here, here, and here) and his name also surfaced as a participant in the hard-left Journo-list email discussion group, on which members fantasized about killing Rush Limbaugh, throwing Michael Ledeen through a plate glass window, and discussed accusing various right-wingers of racism to distract attention from Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

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In all the ink that's been spilled over the confrontation between Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his public employee unions, one point that's been under-emphasized is what a change this is from the recent model of Northern Republican governors.

George Pataki seems to have been more or less forgotten, but in 2004, after being elected three times as governor of New York, he had a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention in New York, just before President George W. Bush. In 2002, the New York Observer reported on Mr. Pataki's support from organized labor: "like many other leaders of organized labor, he has been won over by Mr. Pataki's pro-union rhetoric and actions. Indeed, Pataki campaign officials say that union endorsements will continue rolling in this spring-including some surprising ones." A New York Sun editorial at the time noted, "Mostly, Mr. Pataki earned his union endorsements the old fashioned way — by buying them. In January, he signed over $1.8 billion to finance raises and pay for recruitment of unionized health workers, and he has also signed onto a number of expensive benefits for state workers." In 2002, even the New York City teachers union endorsed Mr. Pataki.

Less than a decade later, the route to Republican stardom seems not to be cultivating the unions, but clashing with them.

Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, via CNBC:

Pointing out that there's been a "massive" government stimulus of the economy since the economic crisis began, Buffett says he thinks that the nation doesn't need as much fiscal or monetary stimulus as it is getting now.

Asked if he's calling for an end to the Federal Reserve's QE2 program of asset buys, Buffett says that while he has "enormous" respect for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, he doesn't think the nation needs more stimulus right now.

As he has in the past, Buffett warned that the U.S. is "following policies that will lead to lots of inflation down the road unless changes are made." He calls inflation the "ultimate tax" and thinks budget deficits around 10 percent of GDP are too high to sustain.

Stanford's John Taylor, for whom the Taylor Rule on interest rates is named, really nails Ben Bernanke in this brief blog post. Well worth reading, even if it gets a little abstruse: "This implies an interest rate of 1.5 X1.4 + .5X(-4.4) + 1 = 2.1 + -2.2 +1 = 0.9 percent."

The New York State health commissioner who served under Governors Spitzer and Paterson, Richard Daines, has died at age 60, the New York Times reports. Dr. Daines first came to my attention as an advocate of a soda tax, which I opposed. After I wrote an op-ed in the Daily News about the idea, he wrote to me:

When I was CEO at St Luke's-Roosevelt on the West Side, my habit was to buy a copy of the Sun at the news stand on 9th Avenue, read it avidly then go up the back steps from my office to that of Mike Lesch, the Chief of Medicine (and tragically deceased now), to enjoy the rational commentary, superb cultural coverage (ballet and Nordlinger in particular), fairness to Israel and intelligent contrarianism.

When I saw your Daily News piece on our proposed tax I wondered if we might engage in New York Sun type dialogue about that topic instead of firing broadsides over the horizon at each other.

So long as we are on the topic of independent schools, a document related to the search process for a new head of school at Worcester Academy crossed my desk recently, and there were a couple of lines that made me smile: "the Academy has never lost sight of its deeply held philosophical tenets: WA has traditionally (for over 175 years) eschewed the image and fact of a socially elite institution." The author of the document, Stephen DiCicco of Educational Directions, Inc., observes that among students at Worcester Academy, "there is not a sense of entitlement that one occasionally encounters in schools."

I graduated from that school in 1990 and have been back only rarely since then, but both lines seem apt. It's striking to me that some of the same themes that echo frequently on this Web site — stick "elitism" or "sense of entitlement" into the search box in the upper right hand corner of the page and spend some time browsing through the results, if you have the time — turn up in the school document.

Why are gas prices on Martha's Vineyard among the nation's highest? A federal appellate court examined the matter and found that it was partially the fault of the Martha's Vineyard Commission, an environmental/zoning/land use regulating government body. The Vineyard Gazette reports:

The experts found that gas prices at Vineyard stations exceeded prices on Cape Cod by an average of 56 cents a gallon during a five-year period beginning in 2003. Of that, 21 cents was tracked to transportation costs.

The high federal court sketched a detailed profile of the Vineyard gasoline market which includes regulatory barriers in the form of the Martha's Vineyard Commission, which it described as a "gatekeeper," effectively capping the number of gas stations here.

The Gazette reports that it came out in the court proceedings that one of the existing gas stations hired a consultant to try to get the Commission to deny a plan for a new gas station, which the Commission eventually did deny.

From the letters to the editor column of the March-April 2011 issue of Harvard Magazine:

I observe that there will be some 32 members with Harvard degrees in Congress, and that 29 are Democrats. If the reader counts only the members with College degrees, there will be 13 members of Congress, 12 Democrats. The development of independent and critical thinking in undergraduates should be a major goal of an education, otherwise the process is indoctrination. The statistics on the political affiliations of the incoming Congress suggest that this is not happening at Harvard College. Could this be a reflection of the ideological imbalance of the faculty?

Amity Shlaes has a column up at Bloomberg News about a for-profit private school planning to open on Manhattan's Upper West Side to challenge some of the long-existing private schools.

Never mind that New York Times editorial the other day admitting, "Salaries and benefits for state employees outstrip the private sector."

The New York Times's economic scene columnist, David Leonhardt, has his facts, darn it, and he's sticking to them, no matter what the editorial writers say. He writes, "No wonder that academic papers spanning more than 30 years have found that government workers receive compensation that is similar — with somewhat lower salaries and somewhat better benefits on average — to that of private sector workers with similar qualifications."

The survey Mr. Leonhardt links to is written by — surprise! — two Wisconsin public employees!

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