At  Alister and Paine.

At National Review online.

Yes, I know that sounds hyperbolic, but consider the title of a new discussion draft from the staff of the Federal Trade Commission:

Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism

Read the document; it is even more terrifying than the title suggests. For further discussion, see here, here, and here.

Addendum: More at forbes.com.

A regular reader poses this question:

What do you think of the thesis that government spending cuts, such as occurred in 1946, are themselves a form of stimulus?

If the cuts are of expenditure that does not pass a standard cost-benefit test, this view makes far more sense to me than the Keynesian hypothesis that paying people to dig ditches and fill them up is good for the economy.

Today’s jobs report prompted me to check out the following:

Between December, 2007, and May, 2010,

Private employment decreased from 115.6 to 107.6 million (-7.4%).

Government employment increased from 22.4 to 23.0 million (+2.6%).

The government figure for May includes Census workers, so some of the increase is temporary.

Still, the change in the composition is striking.

At least 11 states have passed laws this year regulating or restricting abortion, giving opponents of abortion what partisans on both sides of the issue say is an unusually high number of victories. In four additional states, bills have passed at least one house of the legislature. …

At least 13 other states have introduced or passed similar legislation this year. The new laws range from an Arizona ban on coverage of abortion in the state employees’ health plan to a ban in Nebraska on all abortions after 20 weeks, on the grounds that the fetus at that stage can feel pain.

I have two reactions to these laws. On the one hand, the U.S. would suffer less acrimony over abortion if states were free to regulate or even ban abortion as they see fit.  Abortion is a polarizing issue. Most people hold views “in the middle.” If each state can set its own policy, the match between voter preferences and policy will be better than if the federal government imposes one policy – whatever it is – on all states.

On the other hand, most of the regulation being pushed by abortion opponents seems pointless; it will burden the health care system while hardly affecting the incidence of abortion. So both sides in the abortion debate should oppose such laws.

At forbes.com.

The U.S. government debt is rising inexorably, according to the conventional wisdom in Washington, and the political system is too paralyzed to take unpopular actions to rein it in. Privately, many policymakers take it as a given that the situation will change only when the nation faces a Greek-style fiscal crisis.

But apparently nobody told the people who lend the U.S. government money. On Friday, they were willing to hand over their cash to the Treasury for 10 years for 3.3 percent interest, a level so low it implies they consider the United States among the safest investments in the world. Collectively, those investors — think mutual funds, pension funds and foreign central banks — could lose hundreds of billions of dollars if they’re mistaken and the United States has a debt crisis.

It is the Beltway vs. the bond market, and they can’t both be right.

Perhaps, as the article intimates, the resolution of this puzzle is akin to the old joke about two friends who see an angry  bear approaching their camp site. One starts to put on his running shoes. The other says, “Are you crazy, you can’t outrun a bear.” To which the first replies, “I know, but I only have to outrun you.”

As bad as policy is in the U.S., it is worse in most other countries. That may help the U.S. avoid the day of reckoning for a while.

Apparently, when the parishoners stop coming:

Nine cities and towns have forced the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston to pay property taxes on closed churches, schools, convents, and parish halls, contending that the buildings no longer qualify as tax-exempt because the archdiocese is not using them.

Two of the taxed churches — St. Frances X. Cabrini in Scituate and St. Jeremiah in Framingham — have been occupied for years by former parishioners protesting their closure. But local assessors insist the church buildings are now taxable because the vigils are not sanctioned by the archdiocese.

In Libertarian Land, this situation would not occur because all taxes would be explicitly on people, not businesses. So the issue of tax-exemption for churches would never arise.