The post here on PIGS without Jews, suggesting that Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain were in economic trouble in part because they have barely any Jews, was one of the most intensely controversial that we have published here. So it's heartening, I suppose, to see a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research authored by Daron Acemoglu of MIT, Tarek A. Hassan of the University of Chicago, and James A. Robinson of Harvard. From the abstract:

Following the departure of the deputy political director of ABC News to go work for the Service Employees International Union, the White House correspondent for Bloomberg News, Edwin Chen, is leaving the business news wire service going to begin work as "federal communications director" of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, Politico's Mike Allen reports. He had already done one stint at the NRDC, from March 2006 to January 2007, according to Politico.

It puts some of Mr. Chen's Bloomberg News articles, like the one headlined "McCain Is Praised for Climate Stance, Not His Environmentalism," in a fresh light.

Politico's Josh Gerstein, my former New York Sun colleague, quotes Ted Frank, identified as "a conservative lawyer who runs the Washington-based Center for Class Action Fairness":

Frank warned of a potential economic fallout from the White House's efforts to bully BP into paying claims for which it may not have legal liability.

"Every other business doing business in the U.S. has to say: What happens when the government decides to come after me? They expect with Chavez in Venezuela, they have to account for that risk, but if the U.S. does it, that just reduces the incentive to invest in the United States," Frank said. "The damage the administration is doing to the U.S. economy by playing these kinds of games is just appalling."

The New York Times has an article about the Massachusetts immigration crackdown we wrote about here back on May 29. There is a reference to "pockets of anger here over the case of President Obama's Kenyan aunt, who had been living in public housing in Boston while fighting a deportation order." This is interesting for those who defend the "safety net" as a net for those who have no other net to resort to. President Obama made $5.5 million last year. He may or may not want to help out his aunt. He has no obligation to help her out. He may prefer to help her out by paying taxes that provide public housing to anyone who needs it rather than by paying the rent for a poor person who just happens to be lucky enough to have a high-income relative. But somehow, a lot of people would rather have the extra money to choose to help their own aunt, if they want to, than have the government take the money from them in taxes and use it to house President Obama's aunt.

The Economist comments on the "American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act":

a typical piece of congressional sausage-making originally projected to add $134 billion to the federal deficit. Only $79 billion of that qualifies as true stimulus: extended unemployment benefits, health subsidies for the unemployed and more Medicaid money for the states. Most of its hundred-odd other provisions are goodies for assorted constituents from Indian reservation property developers to cotton shirt manufacturers and routine extensions of expiring provisions such as the research tax credit.

A FutureOfCapitalism.com reader-watchdog-community member-content-co-creator responds: "What a crazy definition of 'stimulus'! Entitlement spending is stimulus? Unemployment benefits stimulate unemployment."

Bloomberg News seems to be hoping to sell a lot of terminals to the Hamas-controlled government of Gaza, to judge by its decision to publish an opinion piece by a UCLA English professor describing Israel as "a nuclear-armed state that, by refusing to heed any kind of law -- while periodically going berserk -- endangers not merely its neighbors, but the stability and security of the whole world."

This is the final call for paying subscribers and members in our Spring drive. We are close to meeting our quarterly goals thanks to all of those who have already paid, but we aren't quite there yet. So if you've been meaning to join us to send a signal of support for what we are doing here, to ensure that it continues, and to get your copy of that quarterly report that will be sent only to paying members and subscribers, please reach for that credit card now. Completing online transaction won't take much time at all, and it costs less than a dollar a week. The link is here.

Michael Gerson has a moving column about North Korea based on an interview with someone who was able to escape and who now runs Free North Korea Radio:

"On his birthday, Kim Jong Il would give Mercedes-Benzes to people in the privileged classes," he told me. "He would shower them with tangerines and bananas, which most North Koreans citizens never see." (Consider an economy in which tangerines are symbols of privilege.) "But once while I was traveling on business, I saw a pile of 20 corpses lying on the ground" -- victims of starvation. "This was not uncommon...

Somehow those who see income inequality as a big problem with capitalism don't seem to get as worked up over income inequality in Communism.

A reminder to those of you who would like to become paying members or subscribers of FutureOfCapitalism: Please do so soon if you'd like a copy of the quarterly report, which is delivered only to paying customers. The online transaction will just take a minute or two of your time, and the price at the entry level is less than $1 a week. Our Spring subscription drive will conclude tomorrow, so if you have been meaning to get around to it, this would be a good moment. The link is here.

Thanks to those who have already joined.

Hillary Clinton's praise of Brazil was the topic of a post here last month. Earlier this week, speaking in Quito, Ecuador, in a "Policy Address on Opportunity in the Americas," she sounded a similar theme:

Brazil has one of the highest tax-to-GDP ratios in the world today, but the results speak for themselves. Brazil is an economy and a country on the move...in many places, including often in my own country, the simple fact is that the wealthy do not pay their fair share. We cannot mince words about this. Levels of tax evasion are unacceptably high, as much or more than 50 percent in some of this region's economies when it comes to personal income tax....We simply cannot support policies that reduce poverty and spread prosperity if the wealthiest among us are not doing our part.

The chairman and CEO of Contango Oil & Gas Company, Kenneth Peak, gave a presentation today at an oil and gas conference in London that is accessible on the Web. It's a pretty interesting little company: seven employees, ten natural gas wells, and a market capitalization of about $800 million. Here's part of what he had to say about drilling in the Gulf of Mexico:

The sword of Damocles, I get asked and I'm going to be asked a lot, what's going to happen here? And I think it's possible that this administration and this Congress could, in fact, force us all out of the offshore. I don't think so. I think at some point the adults will step in and they'll bring some mature reasoning to the importance of the offshore business, not only to the coastal states and Louisiana, in particular, but the revenues that we pay in terms of royalties and our lease bonuses are the second largest source to the federal government after the federal income tax.

Walmart's $50 million commitment to a for-profit online education company, American Public Education, is the subject of an article in today's New York Times.

The article says the university will offer Walmart employees degrees in subjects such as retail management and transportation logistics handling, and that "a typical cashier would pay $11,700 for an associate degree and $24,000 for a four-year degree." Notwithstanding all the recent press attention to money manager Steve Eisman's attack on for-profit education, the Times article doesn't get into the question of whether these degrees will be financed with federal student loans or Pell grants in addition to the Walmart money and the money paid by the students. It'd be nice to know the answer.

This morning's New York Times has an account of how the government transportation industry tries to regulate its competitor out of existence:

The commuter van industry grew out of the 11-day public transit strike in 1980, when mostly Caribbean immigrants started driving vans along or near bus routes. The service evolved into a shadow mass transportation system that looks much like those many of the drivers and passengers were used to in countries like Jamaica, Haiti, Guyana and Barbados.

As the number of vans increased, the Transport Workers Union, wary of competition for public buses, pressured the City Council to clamp down on the vans. The Council passed tough regulations in 1994 that made it significantly harder and more expensive for drivers to license their vans.

Drivers are required to keep lists of every passenger they transport and are barred from following the same paths as buses.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth writes on the congressional proposal to impose special higher taxes on investment managers whose companies go public: "Raising taxes on hedge funds and private equity partnerships has a nice populist ring. But proposals to tax carried interest and the enterprise value of certain types of partnerships inconsistently target one sector of the economy. It makes no sense to tax the enterprise value of investment partnerships differently from partnerships that own auto dealerships, ice cream shops or family farms."

The National Association of Scholars has a report out on what colleges assign as summer reading for incoming freshmen: "Most of the books on the list fit neatly with the agenda of the campus left: anti‐Western, anti‐business, multi‐cultural, environmentalist, and alienated. The books do signal what lies ahead for students in many colleges: a four‐year program of more of the same."

Among the assigned books: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, and President Obama's Dreams From My Father.

Link via the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus blog.