President George W. Bush's book, Decision Points, came out pretty quickly by the standard of presidential memoirs. Mr. Bush's last full year in office was 2008, and the book came out less than two years later, in November 2010. By comparison, Bill Clinton's last full year in office was 2000, and his book did not come out until June 2004. Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, and his book, RN, came out in 1978.

The Harvard Business Review has a post on "the principle of reciprocation," advising, "a two step approach: give help or assistance first and then be sure to position your help as part of a natural and equitable process of give and take."

The New York Times has a front-page article about a Republican congressman from Texas, Ron Paul. The article is flawed by a tendentious summary of Austrian economics: "he embraces Austrian economic thought, which holds that the government has no role in regulating the economy....If there is vindication here, Mr. Paul says, it is for Austrian economic theory — an anti-Keynesian model that many mainstream economists consider radical and dismiss as magical thinking. The theory argues that markets operate properly only when they are unfettered by government regulation and intervention. It holds that the government should not have a central bank or dictate economic or monetary policy. Once the government begins any economic planning, such thinking goes, it ends up making all the economic decisions for its citizens, essentially enslaving them."

Last month, the US Federal Reserve announced a new quantitative easing programme, in which it will inject money into the economy by buying up to $600 billion in long-term government bonds. This column argues that now is not the time to be buying back long-term debt. Given exceptionally low long-term rates, the US government should be issuing it instead.

In November, the Fed started its new "quantitative easing programme". The Fed will buy up to $600 billion in long-term government bonds, putting $600 billion of extra money in the economy. Defenders think this is the key to reducing unemployment and breaking the economy out of its doldrums. Though the Fed's motives were initially unclear, Chairman Ben Bernanke's 5 December interview on CBS 60 minutes made it clear that fighting unemployment is a crucial motivation. Critics think this is the first step to out-of-control inflation, dollar devaluation, and a trade war.

The New Yorker magazine is so set against the modern American "Tea Party" movement that it has gone so far as to come out against the original American Revolution, as well. The Americans back then, just like Republican voters today, were ignorant, according to the New Yorker:

An official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Ellen McGrattan, has published a new paper explaining how tax increases helped cause the Great Depression:

Many theories have been proposed for the large contraction of the 1930s and the slow recovery thereafter. Absent in the theories of [Milton] Friedman and Schwartz (1963), [Ben] Bernanke and Gertler (1989), Cole and Ohanian (2004), and many others is any role for fiscal policy in this decade. This paper challenges the conventional view that fiscal policy played little or no role. Tax rates on dividends rose significantly during the decade and, when fed into the basic growth model, imply a large drop in tangible investments and equity values. In the later part of the 1930s, tax rates on undistributed profits were introduced and led to another dramatic decline in tangible investment.

The popularity of F.A. Hayek seems to be really driving the folks at the left-of-center Nation magazine crazy. A recent issue carried an article by the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. professor of history at the City University of New York, David Nasaw, that expressed some skepticism about the charitable gift deduction:

The pattern is all too familiar — a hard-charging New York attorney general, soon to be governor, launching a legal and public relations campaign aimed at ruining a respected business leader, never mind the facts or the law.

Eliot Spitzer, at least, met some public resistance in his "sheriff of Wall Street" battles against New York Stock exchange chief Richard Grasso and AIG chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. This time around, though, free-market types and the state's business community have been mostly out of the public fight as Andrew Cuomo has pursued money manager Steven Rattner.

One can perhaps understand why. Mr. Rattner, a longtime Democratic Party fundraiser who served as the Obama administration's auto "czar," was once a powerful government official vested with arbitrary powers to trample the rights of Chrysler bondholders or non-union GM white-collar retirees. Now Mr. Rattner's own fortune and career are at the mercy of Mr. Cuomo, a powerful government official exercising arbitrary powers of his own.

It may seem less an injustice than a kind of poetic justice.

Even reaching that conclusion, though, requires taking a clear-eyed look at the facts of the case and getting past the narrative advanced by Mr. Cuomo and repeated in most press accounts. A related civil case brought by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission was settled last month without Mr. Rattner admitting or denying the allegations.

The Joint Committee on Taxation has released its "score" of the estimated "cost" of the tax and unemployment benefits deal between President Obama and Congressional Republicans, and the headline number is that, as Bloomberg News puts it, "The legislation would add $857 billion to the federal debt over 10 years."

President Obama is considering a move for tax "reform" along the lines proposed by the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission, the New York Times reports in a front-page article today.

I'm all for a tax reform that would lower rates overall while getting rid of some of the special favors, tax breaks, and "tax expenditures" built into the tax code. But there's a danger inherent in mixing up tax reform and deficit reduction, two causes that are both desirable but that are not otherwise necessarily related. The Times article signals where this is headed with the headline: "Obama Weighs Tax Overhaul in Bid to Address Debt." The article also asserts that the Tax Reform Act of 1986, passed in the Reagan administration, was designed to be "deficit neutral" — I think the Times means to say "revenue neutral" — though "people in both parties agree that the next tax-overhaul effort would almost certainly have to raise revenues to address the nation's growing fiscal problems."

The Cato Institute's Walter Olson has a fascinating blog post about how the government-based economy of Washington, D.C., is booming, in contrast to the rest of the country. Landlords are now asking higher commercial rents in Washington than in New York City. D.C. home prices are up 5.29% on the year, versus a 3.2% decline nationwide. And while newspapers nationwide are laying off journalists, in Washington, specialized news services covering the regulators and appropriators are staffing up. Also, "the Washington, D.C. metro area has now attained the highest family median income of any major city," and "seven of the 10 richest counties in America, including the top three, are in the Washington area." Amazing and important stuff.

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It's interesting to see how the terminology used for tax laws is different depending on which taxpayers are at issue. The left manages to criticizes President Obama for approving "tax cuts for the rich" while at the same time insisting that the middle class not be socked with a "tax increase." If it's a "tax cut" for the "rich," isn't it also a tax cut for the middle class? And if it's a tax increase on the middle class, wouldn't it also be a tax increase on the "rich"?

There was something of a similar debate back in the mid-1990s over a reduction in the planned growth rate of Medicare spending. Democrats called it a "cut," while Republicans insisted that it was an increase, because spending was still going up.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on the 16 new signers of the Warren Buffett-Bill and Melinda Gates "Giving Pledge." It concludes with an interesting message from "Investor and new addition to the pledge, Nicolas Berggruen, 48":

"The state has limits in to what it can and cannot do," said Mr. Berggruen. "Private enterprise can be faster and less bureaucratic than the state."

The Journal also has a copy of Carl Icahn's letter joining the pledge: "those who have benefitted the most from our economic system have a responsibility to give back to society in a meaningful way."

That "give back" phrase reminded me of a recent article in the Financial Times:

"Giving back to the community" is the way business people often describe their philanthropy. It is an arresting phrase because it suggests that their careers have involved taking something away from the community.

The New York Times has an op-ed piece by Jon Meacham comparing President Obama and George H.W. Bush, suggesting that each broke with their base on taxes and that Mr. Obama may follow Mr. Bush as a one-term president as a result.

I think it's off on two points. Mr. Meacham writes that President George H.W. Bush's tax increase was "the beginning of the fiscal discipline that helped create the budget surpluses of the 1990s." I disagree; if you look at the numbers, the budget surpluses of the 1990s really came about because of the Republicans winning Congress in 1994, imposing spending restraint, reforming welfare, and and enacting growth-generating cuts on capital gains taxes.