Consumers in other countries have the choice to use Prize Linked Savings accounts that combine aspects of a lottery with a traditional bank account or savings bonds, but American laws restrict such choices for consumers here, according to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The paper, "Making Savers Winners: An Overview of Prize-Linked Savings Products," is by the University of Maryland's Melissa Schettini Kearney, Northwestern University's Jonathan Guryan, Harvard Business School's Peter Tufano, and the University of Chicago's Erik Hurst.

They write, "there are currently significant legal and regulatory obstacles to PLS accounts in the U.S. Yet in places without such restrictions, prize-linked savings accounts have been both widespread and quite popular."

In a news article over the weekend, the New York Times rejected President Obama's complaint that foreign money was tainting American elections via the Chamber of Commerce. "There is little evidence that what the chamber does in collecting overseas dues is improper or even unusual, according to both liberal and conservative election-law lawyers and campaign finance documents," the Times reported, going on to say that "Organizations from both ends of the political spectrum, from liberal ones like the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Sierra Club to conservative groups like the National Rifle Association, have international affiliations and get money from foreign entities while at the same time pushing political causes in the United States."

BP is paying Kenneth Feinberg's law firm $850,000 a month to administer a claims fund for the Gulf of Mexico spill. This is the same Mr. Feinberg, recall, who was in charge of deciding which Wall Street bankers were overpaid. Bloomberg News has the details, including that the Feinberg firm hired the former attorney general, Michael Mukasey, and his firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, to evaluate whether the compensation was reasonable. Mr. Mukasey says it was; the Bloomberg article doesn't say how much he was paid for his opinion. Nice work if you can get it.

Old Asia hand Ellen Bork, who used to write a column about this sort of stuff at the New York Sun, has thoughts.

Since we just mentioned Bloomberg News's Ryan Donmoyer quoting his former employer on the wire, we should probably also note that over at the New York Times, Tim Arango has written two articles in the past week (here and here) about the New York Post without disclosing to Times readers in either one that he used to work at the Post. I'm not saying that reporters should be barred from writing about their former employers or former colleagues or that there's anything wrong with the articles. Sometimes the kind of background knowledge that comes from having worked somewhere can be useful in informing a person's reporting, and it's not like Mr. Arango's past job history is any kind of deep dark secret. But a reader who knows the background may look at the articles just a bit differently from one who doesn't. Knowing that Mr. Arango is a former colleague of Page Six editor Richard Johnson, for example, may make today's Arango-written New York Times valentine to the departing gossip columnist a little more understandable to readers wondering what is going on with it.

From Paul Krugman's New York Times column today bemoaning Governor Christie's decision to cancel a rail tunnel under the Hudson: "Of the $8.7 billion in planned funding, less than a third was to come from the State of New Jersey; the rest would come, in roughly equal amounts, from the independent Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and from the federal government. Even if costs were to rise substantially, as they often do on big projects, it was a very good deal for the state."

The Port Authority is hardly "independent." Its chairman and half of its board members are appointed by the governor of New Jersey, and it is funded in part by bridge and tunnel tolls paid by New Jersey drivers. Mr. Krugman makes it sound like the Port Authority's share of the funding for this project is just going to materialize out of thin air at no cost to anyone. Same with the federal government's share. New Jersey residents pay federal taxes, so part of the federal share of the project's costs would come out of their pockets, too.

From an article on today's New York Times op-ed page:

Over the past generation, this business model has worked well for one group in particular: the bankers, traders and honchos who work on Wall Street. These days on Wall Street, around 50 percent of every dollar of revenue generated is paid out to its employees in the form of compensation. What other business on earth does this? None.

Bill Clinton's DNC chairman, Terry McAuliffe, is getting into the green energy business, Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

In the past year, McAuliffe founded GreenTech Automotive, which he aims to build into a $1 billion powerhouse. In February he bid to convert a shuttered paper factory in Virginia's southeast corner into a biomass power plant; he's awaiting word. He plans to invest up to $1 billion in wind power with a Chinese company, A-Power Energy Generation Systems. He says he's "jacked up" on fuel cells and is scoping out new technologies worldwide. "What the Internet was for the 1990s, green jobs are for the 2000s," says McAuliffe...

Democrats getting into the green energy business is not so surprising; think Al Gore. But then comes this reference to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association and a possible 2012 Republican candidate for president:

Professors from Princeton, Harvard, and other universities are advising a group of donors and potential donors interested in improving the teaching of capitalism on college campuses.

The professors and donors came together this week at event in New York City sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University. The Center's James Piereson reported that an affiliated organization, the Veritas Fund for Higher Education Reform, has allocated about $4 million over the past three years to programs on 27 different campuses.

The focus on capitalism is the initiative of Marilyn Fedak, the vice chair of AllianceBernstein, who told the group that she was motivated by the atmosphere surrounding the financial crisis and its aftermath: "You know, the greedy vultures of Wall Street had to be stopped. We needed massive government interventions…Your property right? Forget about it."

She realized, she said, "Capitalism in America is under attack."

The editors of the New York Times today add anti-gay protests at the funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq to their list of activities — including "animal cruelty videos" sold for the enjoyment of sicko viewers and the provision of material support to foreign terrorist groups — that fall under the scope of what it considers to be constitutionally protected free speech. What the First Amendment doesn't protect, in the Times's view, is the ability to run a television commercial about a political issue without disclosing your identity or your funding sources. The Times editorialists are First Amendment absolutists regarding everything except for the political speech that the First Amendment was intended to protect in the first place.

The Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth has a really dynamite column up at RealClearMarkets.com on income inequality:

levelers exaggerate economic inequality, eagerly, because they rely on pretax income, which omits the 97% of federal income taxes paid by the top half of income earners and the many "transfer payments," such as food stamps, housing assistance, Medicaid and Medicare. This exaggerated portrait of inequality undergirds the present effort by the Democrats to raise income tax rates ...

A more meaningful measure of inequality comes from an examination of spending. On Wednesday the Labor Department presented 2009 data on consumer spending, based on income quintiles, or fifths. This analysis shows that economic inequality has not increased, contrary to what the levelers contend. ...

Today's New York Times front page reports that the collapse of the honeybee population is the result of a virus and fungus that "proliferate in cool, damp weather." Yet elsewhere on the Times Web site, a "Times topics" page on bees insists ideologically, "Honeybees can adapt to minor changes in global warming, but Colony Collapse Disorder is the most recent bittersweet reminder that human society threatens honeybee habitats and breeding patterns on a global scale." Amazing how "human society" and "global warming" can get blamed for a virus and fungus that proliferate in cool weather.

The New York State health commissioner, Richard Daines, having seen his proposal for a tax on sugary beverages run aground in Albany, has a new front in his battle against obesity. From an op-ed co-authored by Dr. Daines in today's New York Times:

New York City and State are asking the United States Department of Agriculture, which administers the food stamp program, to authorize a demonstration project in New York City. The city would bar the use of food stamps to buy beverages that contain more sugar than substance — that is, beverages with low nutritional value that contain more than 10 calories per eight-ounce serving. The policy would not apply to milk, milk substitutes (like soy milk, rice milk or powdered milk) or fruit juices without added sugar — and its effects would be rigorously evaluated.

The decision of the Nobel Committee to award to prize in literature to Mario Vargas Llosa reminded me of the 2005 Irving Kristol Award dinner of the American Enterprise Institute. From James Q. Wilson's presentation:

In his long and illustrious writing career, Vargas Llosa, the author of countless books and stories of the highest caliber, has moved from an early flirtation with communism to become an outspoken defender of human freedom. In one memorable sentence he wrote this: "prosperity or egalitarianism, you have to choose. I favor freedom--you never achieve real equality anyway; you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion."

Vargas Llosa is a liberal in the classic sense of the term. "Liberalism," he wrote, is a doctrine that is a "relatively simple and clear combination of basic principles," in particular a defense of "political and economic liberty." It teaches no political dogma other than to oppose "dictatorships and collectivist utopias." In his view, that opposition has begun to sweep Latin America even if the realization of democratic regimes is still incomplete.

Bloomberg's Ryan Donmoyer, a participant in the hard-left Journo-List, has an article about a Treasury Department look at the question of whether White House aide Austan Goolsbee did anything wrong in naming Koch Industries in a conversation with reporters about corporate tax structures. The final paragraphs of the article dismiss the concerns:

Christopher Bergin, chief executive of Tax Analysts, a Falls Church, Virginia, publisher of tax information, said it's "incredibly unlikely" that top White House officials would violate confidentiality laws. Even if they tried, IRS procedures put in place after President Richard Nixon tried to use the agency for political purposes would stop them, Bergin said.

"Alleging that any White House would go into your tax information because you're their enemy?" said Bergin, whose group frequently sues the IRS to disclose tax information.