Yale President Richard Levin has now reportedly joined Gene Sperling and Roger Altman on the list of those being mentioned as possible successors to Lawrence Summers as chairman of the National Economic Council. In some ways he has a similar profile to Mr. Summers — an economist and Ivy League university president.

Michael Barone has a column looking at President Obama's re-election chances in 2012: "American voters are not seething with envy over income inequality and are not convinced that we'll all do better if the government takes away more of Bill Gates' money. Obama, like the academics in whose neighborhoods he has always chosen to live, think they should be seething and that if the message is just delivered the right way they can be convinced."

There must have been some kind of memo at the New York Times — not that one was needed — to gin up a Christmas-weekend campaign about income inequality.

Example No. 1. is a Frank Rich column yearning for 1956: "economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class."

Or, if not 1956, then at least sometime before "the 1970s": "How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake? Middle-class income started to flatten in the 1970s and has stagnated ever since."

Or, if not sometime before the 1970s, maybe 1982?: "nearly a quarter of the 400 wealthiest people in America on this year's Forbes list make their fortunes from financial services, more than three times as many as in the first Forbes 400 in 1982."

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial inexplicably siding with Michelle Obama against Sarah Palin on the issue of Mrs. Obama's campaign against childhood obesity.

The Journal: "Adults do have an obligation to teach children how to live, and that includes adults who are role models by dint of their national prominence. JFK asked kids to do chinups for the Presidential Fitness Award..."

Bathing the President's Council on Physical Fitness retrospectively in the aura of JFK is nice, but the fact is that the program, according to its own history, began not under JFK, but rather, like so many other ill-conceived big government programs, under the guidance of Richard Nixon, who was the founding chairman. Childhood obesity reportedly has soared since the program was created, so it's not exactly clear that it's such a great example for Ms. Obama to follow.

The Department of Health and Human Services is imposing new reviews on health care premium increases of 10% or more. So I was interested to see a letter from my health insurer, which is raising premiums 9% next year but cutting the benefits. From the letter from the insurance company:

Currently, your reimbursement for certain out-of-network services, such as those provided in a physician's office, is based on a usual, customary, and reasonable (UCR) fee schedule...The amended benefit, effective on your renewal rate, will not use UCR but will reimburse out-of-network covered services delivered by non-participating providers based on 140% of the published rates used by Medicare.

Healthcare Finance News reports on a federal inspector general audit that found, based on a sample, that the government "inappropriately paid" 6.5 million Medicaid "personal care services" claims for a total of $724 million. "Respondents for 2 percent of the sample claims reported no record of ever providing services to the beneficiaries named in the claims data," the article says. "Eighteen percent of the claims that Medicaid reimbursed for personal care services between Sept. 1, 2006 and Aug. 31, 2007 should not have been paid."

Sept. 1, 2006 to Aug. 31, 2007 were during the George W. Bush administration, for those who are keeping track. But it's easy to see this area of home health-care aides for sick people growing as a trouble spot under ObamaCare.

The new rules of the newly Republican House of Representatives provide for the entire Constitution to be read aloud in the House on January 6. Also, "members will not be able to introduce a bill or joint resolution without a 'statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact' it."

The Washington Post waddles in with a piece about the lobbying efforts of the airport body-scan manufacturers, which we wrote about here one month ago. Reports the Post: "About eight of every 10 registered lobbyists who work for scanner-technology companies previously held positions in the government or Congress, most commonly in the homeland security, aviation or intelligence fields."

President Nixon's signing, 40 years ago today, of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 led to a "birth dearth" that "is a key reason the United States can scarcely hope to cover future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare," Robert W. Patterson writes in a Washington Examiner op-ed piece.

Whatever you think of the "New Start" nuclear arms treaty with Russia, the repeal of don't ask don't tell, or the bill to give more free health care to people who were in the neighborhood of ground zero in the months after September 11, 2001, it says something about the way the system works in Washington that all these things got passed in a "lame duck" session by politicians many of whom have already been voted out of office by the people they are supposed to be representing. If all these things were such good ideas, why couldn't they have gotten done before the election, or once the newly elected Congress is in place? (One might say the same about the tax cuts, though there in the absence of action taxes would have increased on January 1.)

The New York Times reports that President Obama recently "held private discussions with an array of figures, including...Kenneth M. Duberstein, a former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Obama is reading the biography 'President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,' by Lou Cannon, aides said."

Bloomberg News has an article on taxes that runs under the headline "Tax Passage Gives U.S. Wealthy Interest-Free Loans for Roth IRA Transfers." It begins:

The extension of current income-tax rates gives wealthy taxpayers the equivalent of an interest-free loan if they convert a regular Individual Retirement Account to a Roth by Dec. 31.

Investors in traditional IRAs pay taxes up front on conversions to Roth IRAs to get tax-free withdrawals later. Earners in the highest tax brackets who expected rates to rise next year were faced with reporting all the additional income from conversions on their 2010 returns. With the tax legislation, wealthy savers can now defer and use those tax dollars to earn something, according to Christine Fahlund, a senior financial planner at Baltimore-based T. Rowe Price Group Inc.

The Cato Institute's Alan Reynolds has a piece in the Wall Street Journal about taxes:

A 2008 study of 24 leading economies by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concludes that, "Taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States, probably reflecting the greater role played there by refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. . . . Taxes tend to be least progressive in the Nordic countries (notably, Sweden), France and Switzerland."

The OECD study—titled "Growing Unequal?"—also found that the ratio of taxes paid to income received by the top 10% was by far the highest in the U.S., at 1.35, compared to 1.1 for France, 1.07 for Germany, 1.01 for Japan and 1.0 for Sweden (i.e., the top decile's share of Swedish taxes is the same as their share of income).

A link to the OECD study, which is not included at WSJ.com, is here.

Anyone under the impression that the threat of overreach by an expanding federal government had somehow disappeared with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives and the subsequent extension of the Bush tax cuts has another think coming, to judge by today's headlines: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission suing the Washington Post Company's Kaplan unit to get it to not use credit checks in hiring decisions; the National Labor Relations Board proposing that employers should have to email employees or put up posters reminding them of their right to organize a labor union; the Federal Communications Commission reaching for more power over the Internet; and the Department of Health and Human Services imposing new requirements and rules on health insurers who raise prices by 10% or more.

The New York Times, in its business section, has a pretty egregious dispatch about Sears Holdings. A sample paragraph:

Five years after the merger, Sears Holdings is beleaguered, with sales markedly worse than its competitors'. The company's revenue dropped more than 10 percent from 2005 through 2009, the most recent full fiscal year. In the same time period, Wal-Mart's sales rose almost 31 percent, Target's more than 24 percent and Macy's about 5 percent. Sales at J. C. Penney's declined by about 6 percent.