The Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell is more skeptical than I am of the plan by the co-chairmen of the Obama deficit reduction commission, saying that the spending cuts are fake while the tax increases are real: "the Fiscal Commission is asking us to pay higher taxes so that government spending can grow at twice the rate of inflation. That's not a good deal." See also the comment in the comment string by the estimable Arnold Kling, who disagrees with Mr. Mitchell.

Congressman Joe Barton, the Republican who complained that President Obama's treatment of BP was a "shakedown," is now threatening to haul Google executives up to Capitol Hill to testify. The Financial Times reports:

One influential Republican lawmaker in the House of Representatives, who will have new power following last week's congressional elections, has signalled that Republicans will take a closer look at the Street View incident.

Joe Barton, a Republican who is vying to become chairman of the powerful House energy and commerce committee, said in a recent C-Span interview that it was virtually guaranteed that executives from Google would be asked to testify on Capitol Hill.

"There appears to have been a conscious effort to collect information," Mr Barton said of Google. "It wasn't just kind of accidentally gathered."

For this we need Republicans?

One more point on that proposal by the chairmen of the deficit reduction commission: If they really get rid of the entire home mortgage interest deduction and they also raise the capital gains tax rate and eliminate the capital gains tax exclusion on the first $500,000 in gains on sale of a primary residence, housing prices will decline even more. That's good if you are a renter looking to buy, bad if you are a homeowner already, and bad if you lent money to someone using the value of the home as collateral (banks, holders of mortgage-backed securities). Politically, it's a heavy lift.

From a New York Times article on New York literary agents moving their offices to Brooklyn:

The rent in a high-rise in downtown Brooklyn was slightly less expensive than in Manhattan. And the city offered him tax incentives: $3,000 per employee annually, for 12 years.

This has got to be one of the silliest tax incentives out there, paying literary agents to move offices from Manhattan to Downtown Brooklyn. The city should let the literary agents have their offices wherever they want, and not try to push them in one direction or another using tax dollars taken from everyone else.

ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger has been awarded a column in the New York Times, which explains that ProPublica "produces investigative journalism in the public interest." The formulation makes one wonder in whose interest the rest of journalism is published in.

The first column explains, "The Russell 2000 stock index, which is made up of smaller companies, has risen about 21 percent since the beginning of September, when investors started to anticipate that the Fed would intervene in an aggressive fashion."

And here we had thought the run up in stocks wasn't purely because of the Fed but because of the anticipation that Republicans would win big in November's election and push through extensions of tax cuts. Silly us.

Low expectations are what I had for the bipartisan deficit reduction commission, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the draft report that co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson came up with.

What I really like is the plan for fundamental tax reform that would replace the current income tax rates with just three — at 8%, 14%, and 23%.

The CEO and chairman of WL Ross & Co., Wilbur L. Ross Jr., says the natural gas industry is headed for "trauma' and that the trade deals announced on President Obama's India trip were a lot of hype.

Mr. Ross spoke at lunch today as part of the Hudson Institute's New York briefing program.

Mr. Ross said he's done buying banks in America with FDIC assistance, because strategic buyers are now paying higher prices to acquire those banks. He said he is looking in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Germany, seeking to do FDIC-type deals to take over financial institutions there.

Kevin Hassett's comment to Bloomberg television, in reaction to Sarah Palin's comments on the Federal Reserve's QE2, that Governor Palin's "comments were actually surprisingly thoughtful," tingled my super-sensitive American Enterprise Institute-scholars being condescending about Sarah Palin and monetary policy antennae (see here for an earlier example).

So I emailed Mr. Hassett, who is director of Economic Policy Studies at AEI, to ask just what he found so surprising. He wrote back: "Politicians very rarely opine about monetary policy nuances, and almost never do so intelligently. It surprised me to see her doing so, but I would have been equally surprised if just about any other major political figure weighed in. I certainly meant her no disrespect."

Bloomberg News has revised the absurd headline on a story that earlier read "Wall Street Takes $4 Billion From Taxpayers as Swaps Backfire" so that it now reads "Wall Street Collects $4 Billion From Taxpayers as Swaps Backfire."

By the logic of the earlier headline, you could have said "Bloomberg Takes Millions in Terminal Fees From Wall Street." There's a subtle difference between a "take" and a business transaction that two parties enter into willingly. If the swaps had worked out differently, would Bloomberg be writing "Taxpayers Take $4 Billion from Wall Street"?

It's an odd but appropriate coincidence that the same day New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced his resignation, the archdiocese of New York announced plans to close 32 Catholic schools.

Spending by the City's education department increased to about $18.4 billion a year in fiscal 2010 under Mr. Klein, from about $12.7 billion in fiscal 2003. Some of that increase was the result of additional state aid resulting from a court case brought by an outfit called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and some of it was spending in President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. But part of the result was to make it harder for Catholic schools, which in New York for the most part don't have the power to fund themselves with taxpayer dollars, to compete.

The Wall Street Journal has a news article under the headline "Street Vendors Cost the City Millions." It begins:

Street vendors are costing the city millions in enforcement and in uncollected fines.

Roughly $14.9 million dollars in fines went uncollected as of Dec. 15, 2009. Permitting, regulation and enforcement of vendors cost the city at least $7.4 million in fiscal year 2009, with most of the cost attributed to the police's street peddling enforcement unit, according to the nonpartisan Independent Budget Office.

Street vending revenues in 2009 came to about $1.4 million.

David Leonhardt has a column in the New York Times this morning arguing that these claims that "Gold is at a record high" are false. Following Seth Lipsky, I prefer the formulation that the dollar is at a record low to the formulation that gold is at a record high. But beyond that, Mr. Leonhardt writes, "Gold is at a record only if you fail to adjust for inflation." He goes on:

The actual record was set 30 years ago, when the price of gold, in today's dollars, hit $2,387, or 71 percent higher than it closed on Tuesday. This isn't simply a question of math. Anyone who says gold is at a record high (or who said oil was several years ago) is getting the story wrong. Why? Because $10 today is not more valuable than $9 a few decades ago.

Mr. Leonhardt doesn't say what formula he is using to "adjust for inflation." To me, his column doesn't make much sense, because, to me, the price of the nominal, current dollar compared to gold is itself a measure of inflation.

Bjorn Lomborg's global warming movie Cool It opens this weekend at movie theaters in New York, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. The trailer is embedded above.

In the fight between Sarah Palin and the Wall Street Journal's Sudeep Reddy over food inflation, the Los Angeles Times is siding with Governor Palin:

The effects are rippling from financial trading floors to local stores, forcing consumers to shell out more for everyday basics — a cup of coffee, a box of cereal, a gallon of gasoline....

Retail food prices have already started to rise after remaining relatively flat for the first half of the year, said Ephraim Leibtag, an economist with U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.

The agency forecasts that overall inflation for food prices, projected at 0.5% to 1.5% this year, in 2011 will range from 2% to 3%. "But some segments — such as dairy and meat — will be higher than that," Leibtag said.

USA Today reports on government pay:

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office, a USA TODAY analysis finds....The Defense Department had nine civilians earning $170,000 or more in 2005, 214 when Obama took office and 994 in June....Since 2000, federal pay and benefits have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for private workers, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Link via Mike Allen's Politico Playbook.