In my review of Jerry Muller's book Capitalism and the Jews, I write about how the distinction between the Wall Street and Main Street economies is a dangerous one, and how the use of terms like bloodsucker and parasitical to describe the financial industry is rooted in Marxist-Leninism, Nazism, and anti-Semitism. There's a new example today of that kind of thinking, in a column in the Financial Times about the writer Malcolm Gladwell and John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who made billions betting against the shousing bubble and grew up attending the Whitestone Hebrew Centre in Queens:

One measure of how much political trouble President Obama is in is the way that Democrats have taken to differing with him openly. Yesterday it was Missouri's Robin Carnahan saying she was disappointed in Mr. Obama's budget. Today it's Congresswoman Shelley Berkley and Senator Harry Reid telling Mr. Obama to stop bashing Las Vegas, and Senator Dodd warning that by repeatedly issuing new proposals, the president risked undermining efforts to get a banking overhaul law passed. And, according to the Financial Times, another Democrat, Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, reacting to the president's budget by saying, "I see additional tax and regulatory burdens being placed on small businesses and the self-employed." Ms. Lincoln, the FT says, said "she could not understand the economic vision and neither could voters from her state." The New York Times's account of Mr. Dodd's hearing on the banking regulations includes a report of an exchange between Senator Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the banking committee, and Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman who is advising the Obama administration. Mr. Shelby "asked how regulators would discern 'excessive growth' in a bank's share of market liabilities. 'Well, I think — the only answer I can give there is like pornography: You know when you see it,' Mr. Volcker said, paraphrasing the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. Many in the room laughed." It won't be a laughing matter when that much discretion over privately owned businesses gets placed into the hands of clueless yet powerful government bureaucrats.

FutureOfCapitalism.com item on "The New Face of Organized Labor," reporting that last year there were more union members who worked for the government than there were in the private sector, January 25, 2010.

Wall Street Journal editorial, "The Public-Union Ascendancy," February 3, 2010.

"We're not finished with Toyota," the federal transportation secretary said today, prompting a Wall Street Journal article reporting that "The Obama administration toughened its stance toward Toyota Motor Corp. on Tuesday, saying it is still reviewing possible safety defects in the company's vehicles and weighing other actions," including imposing civil penalties in connection with the supposed sudden acceleration problem. This is a perfect example of why it is a bad idea for the government to own or loan money to individual automakers. With Uncle Sam owning 60% of General Motors and also having loaned billions of dollars more to Tesla, Nissan, Ford and Fisker — all to compete with Toyota and its industry-leading hybrid motors — is the transportation secretary advancing a consumer safety interest or a government financial outcome interest? How can anyone know with any confidence? It's certainly a murky area. Some disclosures: I drive a Toyota not affected by the recall. I used to own some Toyota stock (the American Depositary Receipts traded on the New York Stock Exchange) but sold it a couple years back taking a small profit. I'm toying with the idea of buying some more of the stock if the scare associated with the recall drives the price down low enough, but it's not quite there yet. My parents drive a Toyota that is one of the models affected by the recall and have been driving it around without the "fix" installed, including, this past weekend, with my two kids in the back seat. I was an observer from a distance of the scare over sudden acceleration by Audis back in the late 1980s and tend to agree with Peter Huber that it was a phenomenon largely driven by the lead foot on the pedal being pressed by class-action trial lawyers.

The Financial Times has a long and somewhat instructive account of Hypo Group Alpe Adria, a bank that had been majority-owned by the Austrian state of Carinthia, which sold off most of its stake in 2007. The bank was nationalized by the government of Austria in December 2009. The FT's report is convoluted, but it seems like a mess, even by the standards of banks in the 2008 to 2009 period. Anyway, a reminder that government owners don't always do better than private managers, and that not all problem banks can be blamed on the failures of American regulators or American banking law.

A Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, Robin Carnahan, who is secretary of state in the show-me state, is distancing herself from the president's budget, The Huffington Post reports: "From where I stand here in Missouri, I'm disappointed in the President's budget recommendation," Ms. Carnahan is quoted as saying. "Budgets are about setting priorities and it's time Washington started making fiscal discipline and tackling the long-term budget deficit higher priorities."

The New York Times has a wonderful article on the case of Maura Keaney, a New York city government official who was fundraising from labor unions for her boss, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a Democrats, at the same time that she was working on legislation that would affect the unions. Says the Times, "around April 2007, the former aide, Maura Keaney, made between six and a dozen phone calls to union representatives to ask them to be on the host committee for a fund-raising event for Ms. Quinn's re-election bid. The ethics board, which fined Ms. Keaney $2,500, noted that serving on the host committee required a campaign contribution." The paper goes on, "At the time that Ms. Keaney was helping to arrange the May 14 fund-raiser at the large union called Unite Here — where she had once been a political director — she was also working on a key piece of legislation with serious advantages for the city's labor unions. She played a major role in drafting a law to overhaul the city's campaign finance system that excluded New York's powerful unions from new strictures on the amount of money that companies and individuals doing business with the city can provide to candidates."

A New York Times editorial today on the Greek fisc reports, "Now the truth, and its consequences, must be faced: Corruption and tax evasion hobble the Greek economy. Millions work off the books. The private sector generates too few jobs and tax revenues, and one in four Greeks works for the state. It is a system designed to produce deficits." One might wonder -- the Times editorial, strangely, doesn't say -- just what is the marginal individual income tax rate in Greece that drives workers off the books and prompts tax evasion, while retarding job creation? Why, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's tax database, it's 40% -- or well below what the Times editorials have been suggestion will usher in some kind of progressive utopia here in America.

A news article in today's New York Times adds to the point by Thomas Sowell mentioned earlier. Reports the Times: "with the unemployment rate at 10 percent by the end of the year, higher than the worst-case scenario the White House forecast when it proposed the stimulus, skepticism about the stimulus's effectiveness has remained high. Stung by a storm of criticism this fall after numerous errors in the jobs reports were publicized, the White House released the latest figures quietly. This time there was no news conference, as there was last time, but rather a statement late Saturday night from Vice President Joseph Biden Jr."

The most recent Thomas Sowell column: "There was a recent flap because three different members of the Obama administration, on three different Sunday television talk shows, gave three widely differing estimates of how many jobs the president has created. That should not have been surprising, except as a sign of political sloppiness in not getting their stories together beforehand. They were simply doing what Barack Obama himself does — namely, just pulling numbers out of thin air. However, being more skilled at creating illusions, the president does it with more of an air of certainty, as if he has gone around and counted the new jobs himself."

With the Economist hosting forums for money manager Jeremy Grantham to denounce the financial industry as a "blood-sucker," with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd calling Goldman Sachs "blood-sucking," with the Huffington Post and the New York Times running articles denouncing the financial industry as "parasitic," with the Atlantic running a piece by Michael Kinsley pondering a much-discussed article comparing Goldman Sachs to a vampire squid – well, what exquisite timing for the release of the book Capitalism and the Jews, by Jerry Muller.

Just to amplify the earlier post on President Obama's budget, one of the historical tables worth focusing on is the one labeled 1.3 (Excel spreadsheet download). In 2000, federal outlays were $1.789 trillion, or 18.2% of GDP. In 2011, under Mr. Obama's budget, they will be $3.834 trillion, or 25.1% of GDP. This is a big increase. Using the Office of Management and Budget's 2005 constant dollars, 2000 spending was $2.041 trillion, while 2011 spending will be $3.369 trillion -- a big jump even if you adjust for inflation. Granted, as commenter Lyle points out, some of this is for wars and homeland security spending triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001. And granted there are more American people now than there were back in 2000, so government has more people to serve and to deliver benefits to. Still, these are staggering numbers. If someone had told me back in 2000 that in ten years a president would be proposing a budget that spends $2.1 trillion more than President Clinton did in his last year in office -- in other words, that on a nominal basis, federal spending would more than double in the coming decade -- I'd have looked at them like they were nuts, totally nuts. Of course, using fiat currency like dollars as a basis of comparison over time is a little like using a yardstick made of elastic. Gold was trading at $300 an ounce back in 2000, while now it's above $1,000 an ounce. Yes, the size of government has increased over the past decade, but the value of the dollar has eroded, too. And if you find the above disheartening, remember that the real budget buster -- the retirement of the baby boom generation, with the associated impact on Social Security and Medicare spending -- has yet to hit.

"The problem is that neither party has any ideology anymore -- it's just all about getting the money you need to run commercials at election time, and being against whatever the other party is for," writes (warning, coarse language) the comedian Bill Maher, who suggests that if the Democrats want to get a health care overhaul passed, they shoudl come out against it, so that way, the Republicans will be for it. Too cynical?

The headline number being used to described President Obama's 2011 budget is $3.8 trillion. Some context: In its last budget, the Obama administration complained, "Since 2000, health insurance premiums have increased faster than worker's earnings. After adjusting for inflation, family health insurance premiums have increased by 58 percent while workers' wages have increased only 3 percent." After adjusting for inflation, Mr. Obama's 2011 budget is about a 56% increase over 2000 -- putting the federal government in about the same league as those rapacious insurance companies.

There's a law against showing the Superbowl on a television with a screen more than 55 inches across diagonally, Nate Anderson reports. Exemptions apply to homes but not churches. We have so many laws in America that it's hard even for people who want to obey them to keep track of them.