Michael Barone, writing in the Washington Examiner, expands on the point we made earlier about the Census results and taxes. Says Mr. Barone:

growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation's total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal expands on the point we made earlier about the Census results and taxes. Says the Journal:

In order the 10 states with the greatest population gains were Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Colorado and South Carolina. Their average population gain was 21%. In the fast-growing states, the average income tax rate is 4% versus 6.9% in the slowest growing states.

The average population gain of the bottom 10 states was 2%.

The director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, Richard Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, had a piece out earlier this month under the headline "The Great College Degree Scam."

He writes, "the push to increase the number of college graduates seems horribly misguided from a strict economic/vocational perspective...credential inflation arises from a perceived need by individuals to demonstrate potential employment competence through a piece of paper, i.e. a college diploma. Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (although not costless because of the taxes they pay to sustain much of this), but at a high cost to the prospective employees and to society as a whole.....We are deceiving our young population to mindlessly pursue college degrees when very often that is advice that is increasingly questionable."

The results of the decennial Census, announced today, show that the states that gained population (and congressional seats) track pretty closely with the list of states with lower state and local tax burdens. Nevada, Texas, and Florida, all of which showed strong population gains from 2000 to 2010, have no state income tax.

The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting has a wonderful dispatch on how the Maine State Housing Authority spent $1.1 million from the federal Department of Health and Human Services to pay to install alternative energy systems in the homes of low-income Maine residents:

in all but one of the five alternative systems installed, the energy use — primarily electricity — went up, or down too little, to justify the cost of the new energy systems....

To help poor families save on electricity and heating oil, MSHA contracted with a vendor to install solar panels to heat hot water at 10 homes from Belgrade to Rockland.

Each installation cost $7,500.

Of the 10, the report found six were poorly installed, including one where the solar panels were put in upside down; four where the panels were not oriented properly toward the sun: and one where trees blocked the sunlight....In half of the households, energy use increased while the panels were in use.

This all happened between 2005 and 2008, during the George W. Bush administration.

Attorney General Cuomo is planning to sue Ernst & Young under New York's Martin Act for its accounting work for Lehman Brothers, Bloomberg News reports. By going after the whole firm rather than just the individuals involved, Mr. Cuomo risks doing to Ernst & Young what happened to Arthur Anderson after Enron. There used to be a "Big Eight" of accounting firms. Then there were a "Big Six" — Andersen, Ernst & Young, Deloitte & Touche, Coopers & Lybrand, KPMG Peat Marwick and Price Waterhouse. The end of Anderson and the merger of Coopers and Price Waterhouse into Price Waterhouse Coopers ("PWC") — brought it down to a "big four." If a government attack on Ernst & Young takes it down to a "big three," the reduction in competition just makes it easier for the survivors to raise prices, and harder for businesses looking for audit and tax firms to find one that doesn't have a conflict. I'm not saying Ernst & Young exactly covered itself with glory in the Lehman Brothers engagement, but there are lot of employees there who didn't do any work for Lehman Brothers. It's not exactly terrific for business in New York to have the governor-elect using his final days as attorney general running around launching an attack on a company that has 4,700 New York City-based employees.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about how Oregon's tax increase to 11% on individual income above $500,000 a year has produced far less revenue than projected. The paper calls it "an instant replay of what happened in Maryland in 2008 when the legislature in Annapolis instituted a millionaire tax. There roughly one-third of the state's millionaire households vanished from the tax rolls after rates went up."

It'd great to see some enterprising reporter check the facts on this scenario in the Wall Street Journal's home state, New York. As we've reported here:

New York state imposed a "millionaire's tax" in 2009, raising the state income tax rate to 8.97% from 6.85%. That doesn't include the additional New York City income tax. Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Golisano responded by changing their legal residences to Florida from New York, while the Schwarzmans are Paris-bound.

The New York Times had an editorial the other day under the headline "Not So Happy Meals." It criticized McDonald's for "standard marketing: pitch your product to the most easily persuadable. Or as Roy Bergold, a former McDonald's head of advertising, argued once: 'Go after kids.'" The editorial concludes, "it would be easier for parents to do their job if they didn't have to push back against the relentless tide of marketing aimed at their children."

The Times, of all places, should know about this. Though it isn't disclosed in the editorial, the newspaper markets itself to children who can barely read, promoting the newspaper to "K-12 classrooms" by offering discounts of more than 50% off the regular price and games like "news bingo." Teachers who worry their students might be a little young for the Times are reassured, "Consider short articles and other features. Try the weather page, for geography and graphs, and the TV listings, for vocabulary in the brief descriptions. And photographs and captions provide endless opportunities for analysis, interpretation and response."

With apologies and thanks to William Safire.

1. The biggest news Ron Paul will make in his new job as head of a Congressional subcommittee charged with overseeing the Federal Reserve will concern a) emails between Ben Bernanke and China's central banker, Zhou Xiaochuan b) a hearing in which the incoming chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Columbia president Lee Bollinger, is pressed on potential conflicts between his Fed role and that leading Columbia, which is both a big borrower and a big investor c) a probe of the consulting work of former Federal Reserve officials, including Alan Greenspan's work for Pimco.

2. The surprise breakout nonfiction bestseller of the year will be: a) Walter Olson's Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America b) Joshua Foer's Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything c) Daniel Sharfstein's The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White d) Seth Mnookin's The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear.

3. Bipartisan cooperation will break out a) as Republican deficit hawks join Democratic class warriors to ratchet back Social Security benefits for the "rich" b) Republican deficit hawks join Democratic peaceniks to cut defense spending c) Republican deficit hawks join Democratic anti-plutocratic forces to levy a 5% "estate tax avoidance fee" on those who act on the Buffett-Gates "giving pledge."

Another twist on the "is college worth the cost?"/"higher education bubble" argument: the Washington Post reports on "a growing number of American students who enroll at top-ranked British universities, which offer the prestige of elite U.S. schools at a fraction of the cost."

A few more facts about that health care bill for 9/11 responders that Eric Alterman and Jon Stewart are all worked up in favor of:

• The Congressional Budget office says there's $7.4 billion of spending in the bill between 2011 and 2020, though that number may come down as part of an effort to win its passage.

• The health care, including prescription drugs, is to be provided without any deductibles, co-payments, or other cost-sharing.

• Some of this money will go to pay for treatment that otherwise would have been mostly covered anyway by worker's compensation or by other private-sector or government health plans.

The New York Times' Nobel laureate columnist, Paul Krugman, writes:

President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?), adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession, offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.

Well, since Professor Krugman asks, "when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?," I will try to answer.

It might have been November 9, 2010, when a book by a certain Republican named George W. Bush was published. An article here noted:

The New York Times has a news article about the "repeal amendment," a proposed constitutional amendment that would give two-thirds of the states power to repeal any federal law or regulation:

Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.

The National Bureau of Economic Research is out with two studies illuminating effects that you might call unintended consequences.

The first, by Grant Jacobsen of the University of Oregon, Matthew Kotchen of Yale, and Michael Vandenbergh of Vanderbilt, looked at "billing data for participants and nonparticipants in a green-electricity program in Memphis, Tennessee." Some participants started using more energy once they had opted into the "green" program. If you think that electricity is coming from wind or solar power, you might as well leave on all those lights and turn on the air conditioner full blast, because you can still feel virtuous even while you are wasting the energy.

The New York Times Sunday Week in Review section has an article headlined, "Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?"

Not mentioned are Harvard dropouts Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) and Time magazine person of the year Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder).

Maybe the answer to the Times question is, "Yes, so long as you don't stay too long."

You can look at the Gates-Zuckerberg experience at least two ways. One would be to say that the potential to become a multi-billionaire entrepreneur is somehow inversely proportional to the length of time you remain enrolled once admitted to Harvard. ("If I had only dropped out, I might have been more of a success...") The other is that there's a personal cost to being a multi-billionaire entrepreneur, the all-consuming nature of it that can include things such as having to truncate one's normal college experience.