A reader writes:

I don't care for Obamacare--neither the bill nor the process that passed it. I doubt the intended goals will be achieved and I believe the unintended consequences will be manifold. For example, we will quickly see the development of a two-tiered health care system. The wealthy and the best doctors that serve them will opt out of the current system in an acceleration of an existing trends. The remaining doctors will paid less to do more. The wealthy will be paying more out of pocket--that is money that is otherwise consumption or investment. I mostly fear that medical innovation will slow when the current generation of overachieving doctors retire. I believe few if any in Washington understand the role the US health care sector plays in developing best practices for procedures and care.

David Malpass, a Reagan-era Treasury official and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New York, called in to FutureOfCapitalism.com headquarters this morning and for nearly an hour previewed some of his campaign themes.

"I'm running because Washington's expansion is very dangerous for the long term health of this country," Mr. Malpass says.

It's particularly tough on New York, which sends more to Washington than it gets back. "When Washington spends money, it harms New York, because New York puts more than its share into that spending," Mr. Malpass says. "As Washington spends, it relies heavily on New York to pay for it. It's the huge tax burden that's faced by New York."

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office who advised the McCain presidential campaign in 2008, had a devastatating op-ed piece in the New York Times over the weekend on "the real arithmetic of health care reform." Bottom line: "The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion." I guess a left-winger would say that's still pretty cheap for covering 40 million more people for multiple years -- about $12,500 per newly covered person. But that's not the public case that has been made -- the public case that the administration has been making is that this is needed for deficit reduction.

FutureOfCapitalism.com, "The Health Care State of Play," December 21, 2009: "As a political matter, the Democrats will now own health care under the Pottery Barn Rule, which, as the Republicans found out with Iraq, is not without its risks."

The Wall Street Journal editorial, "The Doctors of the House," March 22, 2010: "So this hour of liberal political victory is a good time to adapt the "Pottery Barn" rule that Colin Powell once invoked on Iraq: You break it, you own it."

President Obama's greatest success so far as president -- achieving passage of a health care overhaul -- is also his greatest failure. The politician became famous because of his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech in which he said, "even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America." Yet the House vote on the Senate health care bill broke along party lines, with not a single Republican voting in favor. And the overhaul contained within it at least two policies that divide Americans -- taxing the "rich" to pay for health care for the less rich, and using profits from student loans to pay for health care for the elderly. To achieve his legislative goal, Mr. Obama had to abandon his goal of being a bipartisan national unifier.

A journalist's salary in San Francisco is being paid for with federal stimulus money, SF Weekly reports. Link via Romenesko. The Michael Stoll quoted in the article is no relation to the editor of this site.

The New York Times waddles in with a review of Henry Paulson's On The Brink, which was covered here all the way back on February 4. The Times reviewer writes, "Eight-figure bonuses illustrate Wall Street's singular corruption." As opposed to the seven-figure bonuses they are handing out over at the New York Times Company?

Private regulation is a concept I have been writing about lately -- the idea that businesses can be regulated by other businesses that provide information about them. Examples are Zagats, Consumer Reports, Morningstar, Brightscope.

But markets also regulate themselves, and dynamically self-correct through competition and new entrants. We wrote back in September about Bank of America introducing "basic" products for customers sick of gimmickry and red tape from their banks. Now comes a Web site with word of a new bank, BankSimple, that promises "A simpler bank that is easy to use....No extraneous features....No hidden fees."

One of the bank's founders, Josh Reich, writes on his blog: "Banking should be simple, boring & cheap. We look forward to launching a new type of bank, fueled by new technology, and shaking up the status quo."

Even President Obama's liberal base thinks he's mishandling Israel. With all the problems America has on its hands -- China, Iran, al Qaeda, deficit, health care, jobs -- why is the president spending even an ounce of his political capital on getting in a big fight with Israel and its American supporters?

Martin Peretz seems to assume it's intentional, but how does that explain Brazil, China, Turkey, and Europe, which the Obama administration has also managed to alienate in one way or another. As I put it earlier, whatever one's view of the underlying merits of all these cases, they do pose a certain challenge to the widely repeated narrative that America's problems with the world were all the result of President Bush's clumsy neo-conservative cowboy unilateralist foreign policy.

A veteran of the Obama administration's auto task force doesn't, on the face of it, seem the most likely candidate for comptroller in New York state – at least on the Republican side.

"So far, every free market guy has been skeptical when we start talking," the candidate, Harry Wilson, tells me over lunch at a Greek restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. None of them, he says, have still been skeptical when he is done talking.

So it is for a guy who, when he graduated from Harvard, where he was president of the College Republicans and co-founded a student group that backed the Gulf War, was profiled in the student daily, the Crimson, as "the nicest Republican you'll ever meet."

"We should talk about this openly," Mr. Wilson says. "People say to me, 'you are a free market conservative, how could you do this?'"

Bloomberg News tracked down Melvyn Weiss, William Lerach, and David Bershad to check in on their lives after serving prison time for illegal practices as plaintiff's securities lawyers. Lerach on prison life: "You sometimes have to push and shove to get CNBC on." Lerach also told the wire that "he plans to teach a course titled 'Regulation of Free Market Capitalism -- Why We Have Failed,' at a law school he declined to name."

A FutureOfCapitalism.com reader who liked the post on "Health Care and Income Inequality" wrote to ask for more information on other subsidies, reduced fees, and programs that also make standard measures of income inequality a joke.

The American Enterprise Institute, on the right, and the Center for American Progress, on the left, both have brief, accessible explanations of why the Census Bureau's poverty rate is inadequate.

As the Center for American Progress puts it, "because the rules don't reflect the impacts of tax policies, noncash benefits, child care assistance, and assistance with medical costs, the current measure doesn't show a reduction in poverty when such policies are expanded or an increase in poverty when they are contracted."

Or, as the American Enterprise Institute puts it, "In 2003...14 percent of households below the poverty line owned two or more cars, and 7 percent had two or more trucks."

Russia is going to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the Washington Times reports: "It may not be as dramatic as the Soviet Union attempting to use Cuba as a missile platform, but in the energy wars, the message is the same. Russia is projecting power into the Western Hemisphere while the United States retreats."

The Web site FrontPageMag.com has an interview with me about this Web site; check it out, if you are so inclined. Welcome to new readers of FutureOfCapitalism.com who heard about the site for the first time via FrontPage Magazine. Please consider bookmarking us, subscribing to our RSS feed, or signing up for our free daily mailing list. You can also follow us on Twitter or Facebook, and read us on Amazon's Kindle.

The newly available Congressional Budget Office report starts to give a flavor of what is in this health care overhaul bill. Some section headings: "Nutrition Labeling of Standard Menu Items at Chain Restaurants," "Reasonable Break Time for Nursing Mothers," "Restoration of Funding for Abstinence Education," and "Reducing Part D Premium Subsidy for High-Income Beneficiaries."

The Joint Committee on Taxation has its own report estimating the effects of the bill's revenue provisions. The 40% excise tax on health coverage with annual premiums in excess of $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families would go into effect beginning in 2018. There are new excise taxes and fees on health insurers, drug companies, and medical device manufacturers and importers. There's a limit on the tax deduction for compensation expenses for "officers, employees, directors, and service providers of covered health insurance providers," to $500,000 a year -- I believe the limit in the rest of the economy is $1 million.

Beginning in 2013, there is "additional surtax of 0.9% on earned income in excess of $200,000/$250,000 (unindexed), and a 3.8% surtax on investment income for taxpayers with AGI in excess of $200,000/$250,000 (unindexed)." Combined with inflation and bracket creep, that one will be a doozy, and it is by far the biggest increase on the revenue side -- estimated at a $210.2 billion tax increase over eight years. It will hit high-income, high cost-of-living states like New York and California, whose senators support ObamaCare, the hardest. And if these Medicare sutaxes are passed, they may well set a pattern for the extension of similar taxes to pay for Social Security.

The text of the "Amendment in the Nature of a Substitute" is now posted online. It is 153 pages (amending the 2,409-page-long Senate bill) and includes an overhaul of the federal student loan program.