From Mike Allen's Politico Playbook: "This is the kind of thing that Republicans could easily seize on as a prime example of how Washington is broken. Democrats meeting behind closed doors with 400 lobbyists to talk about how they can keep their hands on the taxpayer cash."

A federal judge in Louisiana, Martin Feldman, has found the federal government in contempt of court for defying his order striking down a ban on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Bloomberg News reports:

The Offshore Marine Service Association, a group representing offshore service vessels and shipyards, urged the president to end what it called an informal moratorium on offshore drilling.

"President Obama claims to have lifted the Gulf moratorium, yet not a single deepwater permit has been issued in nine months," Jim Adams, the association's president, said in a release after the ruling. "As a result, thousands of workers are out of jobs, Americans are paying more for gasoline and heating oil, and our nation is becoming even more dependent on unstable nations for our energy needs."

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, isn't generally my cup of tea, but this YouTube video of Senator Sanders discussing President Obama's new job-creation adviser, Jeffrey Immelt, is worth a listen. There's a certain amount of convergence between the libertarian right and the anti-corporate left when it comes to suspicion of close alliances between big business and big government, and this is an example of that:

The Wall Street Journal notices the Bloomberg administration preparing to seize private property in Queens by eminent domain, then to "solicit bids from a set of developers who have previously showed interested in the site, including Related Cos., Muss Development and Sterling Equities."

If Related, Muss, or Sterling want to build on this site, you'd think they'd be able to pay a market-clearing price for the land rather than use the power of the government to take it from its current owners.

Aetna is pulling out of the individual health insurance market in Colorado, stopping writing new policies and canceling existing ones, we reported here yesterday. Now Karl Rove reports on two other insurance companies that are responding to ObamaCare by getting out of the health insurance business: "Providers such as Guardian Life and the Principal Financial Group are dropping their health-insurance businesses."

Sure enough, Employee Benefit Adviser reported January 28:

Guardian Life will withdraw its medical insurance product line in all states, and will wind down its existing business over the next two years. The decision was announced in a Jan. 25 e-mail to brokers from Scott Dolfi, Guardian's E.V.P. of Business Operations.

The Senate voted 81 to 17 yesterday to repeal the requirement under ObamaCare that businesses file a form 1099 with the IRS for any vendor they pay more than $600 a year. President Obama has said he favored the repeal. Here are the names of the 17 senators who voted to keep that recordkeeping burden in place:

Akaka (D-HI)
Carper (D-DE)
Durbin (D-IL)
Franken (D-MN)
Gillibrand (D-NY)
Harkin (D-IA)

Inouye (D-HI)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Leahy (D-VT)
Levin (D-MI)
Mikulski (D-MD)
Murray (D-WA)

Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schumer (D-NY)
Whitehouse (D-RI)

Quite a crew.

The director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Donald Marron, had an interesting point in testimony yesterday before the Senate budget committee about how tax expenditures obscure the size of the federal government:

Analysts usually invoke official budget measures—revenues and outlays—when trying to measure the federal government. For example, we often hear that federal revenues have averaged about 18.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over the past four decades, while outlays have averaged about 20.7 percent. But those measures are incomplete—and potentially misleading—if some tax breaks are effectively spending programs.

The New York Times takes a somewhat skeptical look at the Securities and Exchange Commission:

by several measures, the S.E.C. is far from starved for money. Its $1.1 billion budget in 2010 was 15 percent higher than the $960 million it received the year before — and nearly triple its $377 million budget in 2000.

Representative Spencer T. Bachus, the Alabama Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said last week that the tripling of the S.E.C.'s budget occurred in a period that included some of the agency's biggest failures — the Ponzi schemes of Bernard L. Madoff and R. Allen Stanford and the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

More:

Last September, H. David Kotz, the inspector general, reported that a lack of adequate policies led the agency to make lease payments that could have been avoided, including more than $15 million for space in Manhattan that no S.E.C. employees have occupied in the last five years.

Commentary magazine's group blog, Contentions, has published an item I wrote about Bloomberg News's coverage of the turmoil in the Middle East.

Triumph of the City, by a professor of economics at Harvard, Edward Glaeser, who is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is two really wonderful books and one really awful book all wrapped into one.

The first book, which is terrific, is a brisk and accessible tour through a series of real-life experiments deeply grounded in data.

Here is Professor Glaeser on grocery store checkout clerks: "As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ widely in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks."

Aetna is responding to ObamaCare in Colorado, The Denver Business Journal reports:

A spokeswoman for Aetna confirmed Monday that the insurer will no longer sell new individual-market health insurance policies in Colorado and will terminate current policies held by state residents no later than July 31, 2012.

The change represents Aetna's third major recent pull-back on health-insurance offerings in Colorado. The Hartford, Conn.-based company announced in the second half of 2010 that it will also stop selling new small-group and child-only individual-market policies....

Insurers have complained that federal health care reform has made offering their product more expensive. Major changes have included the end of lifetime coverage limits, a ban on rejecting policies to children because of pre-existing conditions and a requirement that 80 percent of individual health policy premiums must go to health care rather than to the companies.

With the left already, believe it or not, rushing to blame the unrest in Egypt on the dastardly combination of income inequality — "Egypt's top quintile of earners has increased its share of income since the 1990s, while the country's bottom quintile has seen its portion of the pie get smaller" — and "commodity speculation by hedge funds," it's worth getting into the economic explanations from a free-market perspective. The more one looks into it, the more one finds that Egypt bears the scars of socialism.

This dispatch from Time magazine from 1962 tells the story aptly: "For most of the past decade, Gamal Abdel Nasser's one-man rule of Egypt has rested on a two-word slogan: 'Arab socialism.' Brandishing this vague concept, Nasser has expropriated private property..."

More on this shortly, but for now, just feature these two slides from a presentation by an Egyptian ministry of health official in Washington in 2009:

A professor of economics at Columbia University and director of its Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs, writes:

The truth of US politics today is simple. The key policy for the leaders of both political parties is tax cuts, especially for the rich. Both political parties, and the White House, would rather cut taxes than spend more on education, science and technology, and infrastructure. And the explanation is straightforward: the richest households fund political campaigns. Both parties therefore cater to their wishes.

One Medical Group, the subject of a post here on January 20, is the topic of a news article in today's New York Times. It turns out the practice has venture capital funding from Benchmark Capital. As we mentioned in the first place, the market and technology are moving to address some of the problems that ObamaCare was intended to fix.