The Associated Press has a dispatch on what it calls "Taj Mahal" schools, pegged to the opening of a $578 million public school in Los Angeles that it describes as "the nation's most expensive public school ever":

The RFK complex follows on the heels of two other LA schools among the nation's costliest — the $377 million Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, which opened in 2008, and the $232 million Visual and Performing Arts High School that debuted in 2009....

New Brunswick, N.J., opened a $185 million high school in January....After a firestorm over the $197.5 million Newton North High School in Massachusetts, Mayor David Cohen chose not to seek re-election and state Treasurer Timothy Cahill reined in school construction spending.

UCLA's Leah Boustan, Hernan Winkler, and Eric Zolt and Wharton's Fernando Ferreira have a new working paper out from the National Bureau of Economic Research arguing that, contrary to the predictions of some political scientists, rising income inequality actually leads to increased government spending.

"Some political economy models suggest that, in heterogeneous societies, residents cannot agree either on the composition of public goods or on the taxes and charges used to fund them. In particular, rich households may rely on private alternatives to public goods and the poor may prioritize personal consumption over public contributions, generating dissent between the ends and the middle of the income distribution," they write.

Cornell University professors C. Kirabo Jackson and Henry S. Schneider have a new working paper out from the National Bureau of Economic Research looking at the economics of the New York City taxi industry. From the abstract: "We study the New York City taxi industry where taxis are often leased and lessee-drivers have worse driving outcomes than owner-drivers as a result of a moral hazard associated with incomplete leasing contracts. Using instrumental variables and fixed-effects analyses, we find that: drivers leasing from members of their country-of-birth community exhibit significantly reduced effects of moral hazard."

News articles attributed a drop in the stock market last week to a rise in initial claims for unemployment benefits, and there's no doubt that, compared to the past 20 years or so, the unemployment numbers are grim.

For all that, though, it's worth remembering, as a corrective, that not every one of the tens of millions of unemployed Americans has a case as bleak as the press, or, for that matter, President Obama's Republican critics (or Democrats who criticize Republicans for not extending unemployment benefits), might have you believe. Here are seven types of jobless Americans that you may not see on television or in the newspapers regularly, but who nonetheless are out there. Among those collecting unemployment:

"Bond Yields Showing No Economic Spoils for Republicans in 2010" is the headline over a Bloomberg News dispatch worth filing away for the morning after the election. We shall see.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator M. for the tip.

The New York Times has an editorial denouncing the practice of "mountaintop mining," which it frets would have "downstream impact on fish, salamanders and other aquatic life." Says the Times: "the coal companies need to develop ways to mine this coal without blasting the tops off mountains and fouling the waters below."

The way to do that is with a traditional, old-fashioned mine, which may be friendlier to salamanders but is a lot more dangerous to human miners, a species that the Times rather astonishingly manages to write the entire editorial without even a nod toward the safety of. More on the tradeoffs between safety of humans and salamanders in mining here. Nothing against salamanders, and, like many things, it isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, but if it were up to me I'd be willing to expose the salamanders to some risk to save some human miners.

"Beijing, beware," writes a finance professor at Peking University, Michael Pettis, in Foreign Policy: "China's economic growth has followed what's sometimes called "the Japanese model." In Japan and other Asian countries, this model has proved extraordinarily successful in the short term in generating eye-popping rates of growth -- but it always eventually runs into the same fatal constraints: massive overinvestment and misallocated capital. And then a period of painful economic adjustment....too much of the economy depends on hidden subsidies to survive."

Link via The Browser, which summarizes the piece as, "Government sets industrial policy, directs resources and subsidies. Result is over-investment, misallocated capital."

Hardly any of the press coverage of General Motors' turn to a profit and preparation for a public offering has made mention of the point, but one significant factor for GM has not so much to do with the cars it makes but a lot to do with accounting. Unlike most other companies that go through bankruptcy, GM got to carry its losses though the process. That has the effect of increasing the New GM's after-tax cash flow, making the bailout look more positive, enabling quicker payback of loans, and denying taxpayers money in taxes from GM that the company might otherwise owe.

TheStreet.com gets at the issue in an article on GM's planned acquisition of AmeriCredit Corp.:

Accounting rules state that when companies have a better than 50% chance of earning enough money to make use of past losses to offset their tax bill they can claim the losses as an asset, often referred to as a "deferred tax asset." When companies have a history of repeated losses they must take a "valuation allowance" which is recorded as a liability.

The Hong Kong Economic Journal has published my review of Gabriel Schoenfeld's book Necessary Secrets.

Bloomberg News keeps up its track record of biased coverage of the effort to extend the Bush tax cuts with an article about an effort by business groups who back the tax cuts. The article quotes not a single business owner or executive, but it does quote three professors. If it were an article headlined "liberal professors favor tax increases," that'd be one thing, but it's supposed to be an article about a coalition of business groups that favor extending the tax cuts. How did all these professors get involved?

Thomas Sowell has a new column:

Someone once said that a democratic society cannot survive for long after 51 percent of the people decide that they want to live off the other 49 percent. Yet that is the direction in which we are being pushed by those who are promoting envy under its more high-toned alias of "social justice."

Under the headline "Young Lawyers Turn to Public Service," the New York Times has an article about attorneys choosing to stay in jobs at non-profits or government rather than to work at large law firms.

Other deferred associates like Avi Singh see public interest law as a "sustaining motivation" that keeps him coming to work every day. Mr. Singh is a 2009 Harvard Law School graduate who decided to stay on with the Santa Clara County public defender's office in San Jose, Calif., instead of returning to the firm Quinn Emmanuel after a four-month deferral.

The president and CEO of the Searle Freedom Trust, Kimberly O. Dennis, has a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the Warren Buffett-Bill Gates "Giving Pledge":

the wealthy may help humanity more as businessmen and women than as philanthropists.

What are the chances, after all, that the two forces behind the Giving Pledge will contribute anywhere near as much to the betterment of society through their charity as they have through their business pursuits? In building Microsoft, Bill Gates changed the way the world creates and shares knowledge. Warren Buffett's investments have birthed and grown innumerable profitable enterprises, making capital markets work more efficiently and enriching many in the process....

The Manhattan Institute's Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who used to write for the New York Sun when I worked there, has a nifty column linking the current Republican push to end birthright citizenship to the passage of ObamaCare:

It's no coincidence that the debate over birthright citizenship has sprung up in the wake of the expansion of the welfare society enacted by Congress and the Obama administration - accompanied by prospective tax hikes. European countries cannot welcome immigrants because the welfare benefits they confer upon their citizens are simply too expensive to offer to newcomers....

As America slouches towards the European economic model, the European immigration model appears newly attractive. The European economic and immigration models are complementary - we need to reject both.

The opponents of the California attempts to ban Happy Meal toys now have their own Web site: FreeToChooseOurMeals.com.