Pimco fund manager Bill Gross has taken a lot of criticism around here, but he finally makes some sense in his April 2010 market commentary:

should it concern an investor in 30-year Treasuries that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the present value of unfunded future social insurance expenditures (Social Security and Medicare primarily) was $46 trillion as of 2009, a sum four times its current outstanding debt? Of course it should, and that may be a primary reason why 30-year bonds yield 4.6% whereas 2-year debt with the same guarantee yields less than 1%.

A Michael Barone column and a New York Sun editorial both focus on how President Obama has alienated America's traditional allies, a theme we have been marking here for some time. On the upside, for those who favor the traditionally strong relations America has had with Israel and Britain, if Mr. Obama manages to turn those countries into full-fledged enemies of America like Syria or Iran, the president may then feel obliged to reach out to them they way he's been doing with Syria and Iran. I

A reader sent in a link to a New York Times article from over the weekend that reports on how state governments are expanding taxes to a variety of hitherto untaxed services -- dry cleaning, jugglers, funerals, landscaping. "They should tax breathing," was the reader's dry suggestion. Some would argue that ObamaCare's requirement that Americans pay for health insurance or pay a penalty is exactly that -- a tax on breathing. And by the time the individual mandate kicks in, the death tax is also scheduled to return, so you get taxed whether you breath or you don't.

Just about every government health care program has wound up costing a lot more than originally predicted. Heritage has a post from last summer with the details.

The blog Political Math has a great visual display of how the narrow-one-party passage of health care legislation is unusual when it comes to major social legislation.

Randy Barnett, a law professor who a commenter notes should be added to our list of ObamaCare Constitutional skeptics, has offered a draft of a Constitutional amendment he calls the "Federalism Restoration Amendment":

Section 1. The legislative power of Congress shall not be construed to include mandating, regulating, or prohibiting the private health insurance of any person not an employee of the federal government.

Section 2. Whenever two thirds of the Governors of the several States concur, they may rescind any law or regulation of the United States, or they may propose amendments to this Constitution, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.

The Obama statement announcing his intention to make 15 recess appointments is a good example of the way he has abandoned his original stated goal of making fundamental change in the way Washington does business. The statement says, "President Bush had made 15 recess appointments by this point in his presidency," and it goes on to list the names of 15 people that President Obama will appoint. Mr. Obama campaigned on doing things differently from Mr. Bush; now he seems intent instead on matching Mr. Bush right down to the exact number of individuals whose presence in the executive branch will testify to the president's sour relations with Congress. And it's all announced in a Saturday press release, a classic inside-Washington tactic to minimize the impact of an unfavorable news development. If Mr. Obama thought the Democrats were going to regain a filibuster-proof majority in the 2010 elections, there'd be no reason to go this route; clearly, he expects his party to lose seats. Alas for him, he can't get the candidates confirmed like the health care bill, through "reconciliation."

The New York Post has a news article, and Senator Schumer has a press release, about whether the $5.4 million the State Department is going to spend on new crystal stemware for American embassies is going to be spent on foreign or domestic manufacturers. They both overlook the more important issue: why are taxpayers going to spend $5.4 million on fancy wine glasses for embassies in the first place? What have the diplomats been drinking out of all these years? Have the chipped glasses really hurt American prestige abroad? If new glasses are really needed, here is an idea: Kmart is selling a perfectly nice set of 4 wine glasses for $7.99, or about $2 a glass. The government could buy 400 wine glasses for each of the about 175 American embassies for about $140,000, and save the taxpayers $5.26 million. If the government is really intent on spending all $5.4 million, it could deploy 15,000 of these $2 wine glasses at each embassy, enough so that the diplomats wouldn't even have to bother washing them -- they could just throw them out after each use.

The Washington Examiner's Chris Stirewalt writes on the Obama administration's plan to do more on principal reductions/foreclosure prevention for out-of-work homeowners: "Never in American history has unemployment been made so appealing by the government. The old idea of stopgap unemployment insurance has turned into an ongoing welfare program for anyone who lost a job in the Panic of 2008 and its aftermath. And now we're going to say that the unemployed don't have to pay their mortgages either."

Massachusetts state treasurer Timothy Cahill, whose views on health care were featured here first back on March 18, has op-ed pieces in both today's Wall Street Journal and today's Washington Examiner.

General Electric's leftward lurch, which we've been documenting here, is starting to generate a backlash. "Immelt uses GE's vast lobbying resources to expand the size and role of government in order to create markets for its products and loot Americans of their liberty," says a statement from Tom Borelli, "director of the National Center for Public Research's Free Enterprise Project," better known as a veteran tobacco company lobbyist. The Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney is also on the case, calling GE "the for-profit arm of the Obama administration."

"Government Pay Higher Than Private Sector," FutureOfCapitalism.com, March 5, 2010.

"The Government Pay Boom," Wall Street Journal editorial, March 26, 2010.

And the Journal doesn't even mention Politico's story this morning reporting that "Nearly 2,000 House of Representative staffers pulled down six-figure salaries in 2009, including 43 staffers who earned the maximum $172,500 — or more than three times the median U.S. household income."

"Many of these people have a great deal of expertise," explains a spokesman for Speaker Pelosi, Brendan Daly, who makes $172,500.

"Tea Party Advocates Who Scorn Socialism Want a Government Job," is the inaccurate and tendentious and biased and just plain embarassingly bad headline over a Bloomberg News article this morning. The article is nearly as bad as the headline:

Tea Party activists, who are becoming a force in U.S. politics, want the federal government out of their lives except when it comes to creating jobs.

More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level.

At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation.

Interesting article in today's New York Times on how the structure of doctors' businesses affects their politics:

As doctors move from being employers to employees, their politics often take a leftward turn. This helps explain why the American Medical Association — long opposed to health care reforms — gave at least a tepid endorsement to Mr. Obama's overhaul effort.

Gordon H. Smith, executive vice president of the Maine Medical Association, said that his organization had changed from being like a chamber of commerce to being like a union.

Charles Krauthammer, in a new column, reports that the value-added or consumption tax we have been warning about here is on the way:

Liberals have long complained that Reagan's strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes -- then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.

Obama's strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first -- which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.

As a substitute for the income tax, the VAT would be a splendid idea. Taxing consumption makes infinitely more sense than taxing work. But to feed the liberal social-democratic project, the VAT must be added on top of the income tax.