While we are on the topic of strange SEC settlements, consider the one announced yesterday, in which Bank of America agreed to pay a $33 million penalty for making "materially false and misleading statements" in a proxy statement filed with the SEC on November 3, 2008. The SEC complains that Merrill Lynch, which was being taken over by Bank of America, paid out $3.6 billion in bonuses for 2008 despite having lost $27.6 billion that year.

"Be suspicious," was John Stossel's reaction to yesterday's Washington Post op-ed piece by the chief executive of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, calling for spending more federal money on "clean energy" research, development, and deployment. Mr. Stossel turned out to be prescient; today, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it filed and settled civil fraud charges against GE, and the company agreed to pay a $50 million penalty to settle the matter with the SEC. I called David Bergers, the regional director of the SEC's Boston office, and Mr. Bergers told me the $50 million goes right to the general federal Treasury, not to the SEC's budget. I asked why the money should go to the federal government rather than to particular individuals who bought or decided not to buy GE stock based on what the government says were improper accounting methods. Mr. Berger told me that the SEC does distribute money to individuals in some cases, but avoids it in cases where the cost of identifying individuals and distributing the money would dwarf the amount of the settlement.

In an earlier post I noted that the $29 camp physicals being offered by Target and hailed as "effective, affordable, and convenient" by economics professor Mark Perry involve being seen by "a physician assistant or a licensed nurse practitioner."

It turns out that's not just a free-market solution to the problem of how to reduce health care costs. Time magazine reports: "In the recently released House health-reform bill, nurse practitioners (and physician's assistants, another relatively new, but smaller, category of medical professionals who can perform medical procedures and often prescribe medication) are listed alongside doctors as primary-care providers."

The president of the Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern, has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing for tough rules on private equity funds that invest in banks. He doesn't deal with Wilbur Ross's objection that the rules are so tough that they'd discourage him from investing in banks at all. He also has a peculiar narrative of the demise of WaMu: "Private equity's recent track record suggests that it needs regulation on this front. For example, the Texas Pacific Group's (TPG) disastrous investment in Washington Mutual last year prevented the financial giant from raising additional capital until it was too late, resulting in its forced fire-sale to J.P. Morgan Chase. This wiped out TPG's entire investment."

The Associated Press has a news article and a chart illuminating the downturn in federal tax receipts, which the AP says are "on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression." There was a warning of this in a September 5, 2006 New York Sun editorial, headlined, "Progressive?" which answered calls for increasing taxes on the rich by explaining "the tax code, both at the federal level and in New York City and State, is already so 'progressive' that our governments are essentially mortgaged to the rich. It's almost a 'Hedge Fund Government,' whereby the government's revenues are increasingly dependent on stock market performance." That editorial is looking pretty astute just about now. It warned that "If the stock market were to decline sharply," the effect would be "huge government budget deficits open up." The Sun editorialists made the same points about New York state in a June 4, 2002 editorial, "Mortgaged to the Rich," which quoted E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute as saying, "When the rich get a toothache in New York, the state gets a big headache." Or, as an October 28, 2002 New York Sun editorial, "Mortgaged to the Rich, Part II," put it, when New York's wealthy sneeze, the city and state budgets catch a cold.

John Stossel's blog at ABC News notes a Los Angeles Times article about a congressman from Wisconsin, Steve Kagen, a physician who is refusing his federal health benefits until all Americans get the same coverage he qualifies for. The L.A. Times reports, "Kagen recently had knee surgery, writing checks for more than $4,500 after bargaining for a reduced-rate MRI and a 50% discount on the operation. (He is still dickering over the hospital bill.)"

Over at the Tax Foundation's blog, Joseph Henchman looks back at Barack Obama's campaign promises to cut taxes on all but the highest-income Americans, and says, "in essence, President Obama seems to have won support for expanding government programs by promising that most people won't have to pay for them. Free lunches are indeed popular, but they're also unsustainable over time."

An investment strategist at a Fortune 500 Company recent offered FutureOfCapitalism.com the benefit of some wisdom accumulated in his 50 years on Wall Street. We'll call him Sage No. 1. He begins by mentioning a figure from the past, Alan Greenspan. "History is a continuum. One thing leads to another," Sage No. 1 says. "I always come back to Greenspan. When I first met him, it was in 1962," when the future chairman of the Federal Reserve was operating a newsletter about steel industry statistics. "If he had just stuck to that," things might have turned out okay, Sage No. 1 says. Unfortunately, in addition to the statistics, the newsletter also rendered opinions. Greenspan went on to head the president's Council of Economic Advisors during the Ford administration, which wasn't exactly an economic boom.

Capitalism, Sage No. 1 says, is "like religion. Either you believe or you don't believe." Having tried living on a socialist kibbutz, "It has its pros and its cons. It wasn't for me."

In our original analysis of the federal "Cash for Clunkers" program, we wrote, "We're assuming that the customer wouldn't have traded in the Trans Am at some point in the next ten years even without a subsidy, which is probably a flawed assumption that in any case only strengthens the case against the government subsidy." The CEO of Edmunds.com, Jeremy Anwyl, has an article in today's Wall Street Journal reporting that "in any given month 60,000 to 70,000 'clunker-like' deals happen with no government program in place. The 200,000-plus deals the government was originally prepared to fund through the program's Nov. 1 end date were about the 'natural' clunker trade-in rate." If these deals were going to happen anyway, why subsidize them?

The New York Times has an editorial this morning averring that a tax on "very expensive" health care plans "might make sense." It is at least the tenth tax increase the Times has supported in the past six years. We noted the ninth here, and the previous eight were enumerated in this New York Sun editorial.

The bank BB&T was forced to accept $3.1 billion in TARP money, its chairman, John Allison IV, tells the New York Times. "It's going to cost us about $250 million for money we didn't want," he says. A similar scenario reportedly played out at Wells Fargo. It'd be interesting to understand more of the details of how the banks were "forced." What was the threatened consequence if the bank failed to accept the money, and how was that threat communicated?

The Wall Street Journal catches up with Senator McCain for an interview, and the result is a maddening reminder of why he lost. "Never have I seen such a transfer from the private enterprise system to the government of such massive scale," Mr. McCain tells the journal, mentioning the auto companies, the banks, insurance companies, and the stimulus package. So far, he's making some sense. Then the talk goes around to health care and the pharmaceutical industry: "by the way, if the pharmaceutical companies can save us $100 billion, why don't they do it now? For the love of God, doesn't this mean that they've been ripping us off?"

It seems to have escaped Senator McCain that the job of the drug companies isn't to save the federal government money, but to maximize profits for their shareholders. Reversing what he calls a rip-off would be exactly the sort of transfer from the private enterprise system to the government that he was earlier decrying.

Big news today is that the government has run through the $1 billion allocated to the "Cash for Clunkers" program. An environmentally savvy friend emailed to suggest I run the numbers on just how pricey the program's carbon savings are. So here's one example: a driver trades in his 1999 Pontiac Trans Am, which gets an estimated 18 miles a gallon, for a 2009 Toyota Corolla, which gets an estimated 30 miles a gallon. The government pays $4,500 toward the Corolla under the terms of the "cash for clunkers" program. Driving the average of 12,000 miles a year, the Pontiac burned 10,671 pounds of carbon a year, while the Corolla burns just 8,385 pounds. So the $4,500 saves 2,286 pounds of carbon a year, or, to round up, 23 tons of carbon over the ten year life of the vehicle. (We're assuming that the customer wouldn't have traded in the Trans Am at some point in the next ten years even without a subsidy, which is probably a flawed assumption that in any case only strengthens the case against the government subsidy.) It works out to about $196 per ton of carbon prevented.

New York Times columnist Floyd Norris has an interesting article today arguing, "there is little evidence that big pay — or the incentives connected to it — caused the financial train wreck that sent the world into recession." He frames his own argument as differing with Congressional Democrats, such as Rep. Barney Frank, but he doesn't mention President Obama or his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who said in a June 10 press release, "This financial crisis had many significant causes, but executive compensation practices were a contributing factor."

We noted earlier this week that Senator Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, was blocking the nomination of the American ambassador to Brazil pending reassurance from the Obama administration of its support for a tax on imported ethanol. The administration quickly avowed its support in a letter to Mr. Grassley from Secretary of State Clinton and the U.S. Trade Representative. "I'm glad the Administration made clear so quickly that the President supports maintaining the 54 cent-per gallon tariff on imported ethanol," Mr. Grassley said in a press release today. What a wonderful example of bipartisanship in Washington! Less glad will be American consumers who will pay the price at the pump for protectionism. The Obama administration is so upset about high gas prices that it wants to regulate energy traders, but it apparently is not so upset that it wants to risk Mr. Grassley's wrath, or that of the farmers in Mr. Obama's home state of Illinois, by repealing the tariff on imported ethanol.