From a New York Times column this morning:

A second clerk, a young man with tattoos crawling up his arm, expressed great concern about the way mothers in the neighborhood "push their strollers out into the street before they can see if a car is coming." (Indeed, a Department of Transportation report released Monday found there were more pedestrian traffic fatalities and serious injuries in Brooklyn than in any other borough.)

A lively new YouTube video from the Republican Study Committee revives the voice of Ronald Reagan and contrasts it with some of the utterances of today's Democrats.

There may well be some good arguments for loosening the restrictions on American travel to Cuba, as the New York Times reports this morning that the Obama administration is preparing to do. But it's interesting to note that if you go to the Communist Party USA Web site, the very top action alert urges visitors, "End travel ban to Cuba/ Act now to support the Peterson-Moran bill, HR 4645 that will end the ban on travel to Cuba."

Now if the administration would only name Elizabeth Warren as head of the new consumer financial protection agency ("Confirm Elizabeth Warren," the CP USA's organ, the People's World, writes), the CPUSA will be able really to declare victory.

If you think the "Ground Zero Mosque" is controversial, wait till the Obama administration follows Britain's lead (as reported by the Financial Times) and start issuing U.S. sovereign debt in the form of Islamic bonds.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column up at Forbes.com outlining a plan for reforming public-sector labor. It begins with some amazing statistics:

Right now the number of private sector employees outnumber public employees by about a 5 to 1 ratio. Yet with the recent collapse of the automobile and construction industries, public sector union members at 7.9 million workers outnumber the 7.4 million private sector union members. Put otherwise, the penetration rate of labor unions in the private section is at an all-time low of 7.2%. The similar number for public employees is around 43%.

His suggestions include "Reduce pensions for public employees to the levels received by their peers in private industry" and "deregulate, lower taxes and slash budgets."

Amity Shlaes has a new column posted at Bloomberg observing that the president has not progressed up what she calls "the Social Security learning curve." She writes, "This world-is-flat executive is the price we pay for electing as president someone who hasn't thought much about either the economy or entitlement reform"

Microsoft founder Bill Gates reviews the education-reform book Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education:

things like teacher measurement, pay for performance, teacher choice, charter schools, and vouchers have only been tried in very limited ways....The book offers charts showing that virtual schools, cyber charters, and rich data systems are less developed in the more unionized states.

The Washington Post couches it in investor-relation-press-release language, but there it is: The Obama Education Department, at the behest of short-sellers, is getting ready to punish for-profit colleges (including the Washington Post Company's Kaplan University) whose students take advantage of the Obama administration's own debt forbearance programs:

An Economic Policies for the 21st Century editorial looks at what is happening in Germany:

Were Eurostat to use annualized rates like the United States' Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the German growth rate would have been 9.1%, which means the German economy grew nearly four-times faster than the 2.4% annualized growth rate recorded by the U.S. economy in the second quarter (Eurostat quantifies the U.S. growth rate as 0.59%). Over the twelve months ending in June, the German economy grew by 3.7%, half a percent faster than the 3.2% rate recorded by that of the U.S. More significantly, German growth has accelerated at the same time as growth in the U.S. has slowed markedly.

There's still room for an article with more detail on just how Germany accomplished this, but what it's not doing is piling "stimulus" atop "stimulus."

The Associated Press reports from Columbia, South Carolina: "Obese government workers in South Carolina can get stomach-shrinking surgery through the state health plan under a pilot program that starts in January....The surgeries - which involve either surgically creating a smaller stomach or shrinking intake with a belt-like, adjustable device - cost about $24,000 each....At least six states require insurance companies to cover morbid obesity treatment, including gastric bypass surgery: Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire and Virginia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures."

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University is attracting some press attention for a new report on the financing of state judicial elections. A National Public Radio story is headlined "Report: Too Much Money Going To State Court Races," and quotes one of the report's authors as saying, "Fundraising in judicial races doubled to $206 million [over the years 2000-2009] from just $83 million in the '90s, from 1990 to 1999."

The report has an introduction from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, adding some prestige, and, because Justice O'Connor was appointed by President Reagan, countering the perception that the Brennan Center is just a left-wing advocacy group.

The Manhattan Institute's City Journal has an article headlined "The Free-Marketeers Strike Back" by Guy Sorman interviewing what he describes as a bunch of free-market-oriented economists — the University of Chicago's Eugene Fama, Luigi Zingales, and John Cochrane, Columbia's Charles Calomiris, Rama Cont, and Pierre-André Chiappori, Princeton's José Scheinkman — about the financial crisis:

What has Fama learned from the crisis, then? "I learned a lot about government overreactions but not much about recessions," he tells me. Confronted with a sharp economic downturn, governments face political pressure to act; stimulus spending and other state interventions seem sensible, even when the history of past crises suggests otherwise. Worse, the new public debt and regulations then hobble economic recovery. Rebounding from the post-2007 recession would have been quicker, Fama believes, if the government had mostly let free markets clean up the mess, reestablish true prices, and select the enterprises able to survive.

The American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Hassett has a Bloomberg column up that is something of a rebuttal to Andrew Grove's lament about the decline of American manufacturing:

Manufacturing has been declining as a share of U.S. gross domestic product for some time, from about 28 percent in 1950 to about 11 percent in 2009. Any economist can tell you that this decline is not necessarily a cause for concern.

Over the past few decades, our economy has transformed dramatically, and the importance of innovation has increased sharply. ...We have become an ideas economy.

That's not a problem. It's economic evolution, a natural and positive force. The agricultural sector has seen a similar decline in the last 60 years, falling to 1 percent of GDP from roughly 7 percent....

Bloomberg News's Caroline Baum has a new column with two provocative ideas on taxes and Congress.

One is a Constitutional Amendment either repealing the 16th Amendment (the one that gave Congress the power to levy an income tax) or limiting that power: "Congress may extend no credit, deduction, or other distinction of law regarding tax rates, filing status or type of economic or business activity unless it is applicable to all taxpayers."

The biggest tax collector in American history was George W. Bush, Bill Frezza writes at Real Clear Markets:

During the eight years of the Clinton Administration the Federal government collected a total of $5.66 trillion dollars in individual income taxes. During the eight years of the Bush Administration the Federal government collected approximately $7.45 trillion dollars in individual income taxes. The rich - that is, the top 1% of taxpayers - not only forked over a trillion dollars more to Uncle Sam under Bush than under Clinton, their share of the income tax burden increased from 33% to 38%.

[Edited August 25 to reflect a correction issued by Mr. Frezza.]

Interesting stuff.