• The federal government is assuming a larger share of the Medicaid bill.
• General Electric might eventually need to be renamed Government Electric.
• The government’s mail monopoly lost $3.8 billion last fiscal year and could lose more this year.
• The $98 billion in improper payments made by the federal government last year undermines the case for expanding its role in subsidizing health care.
• Cost overruns in the British government mirror problems in the U.S. government.

Here’s what Tax-news.com reported:

The poll of more than 300 entrepreneurs by business advisors Tenon also found that many more may follow in an attempt to escape the 50% rate of income tax, due to be introduced from next April on annual incomes above GBP150,000, with nearly half of the respondents (48%) still deciding what action to take. …Tenon points out that in the last month, high profile names such as the actor Sir Michael Caine and the artist Tracey Emin have threatened to change their tax residency to countries with more favorable tax rates. Popular locations for redomiciling include Monte Carlo, Guernsey, Liechtenstein, and the Cayman Islands. Andy Raynor, Chief Executive of Tenon Group, noted that entrepreneurs are showing their disapproval of the tax measures by “letting their feet do the talking.”

The mayor of London, meanwhile, is much less restrained regarding the foolishness of Gordon Brown’s class-warfare policy. Here’s what he has to say in the Daily Telegraph:

[T]he 50 [percent] tax rate that is beginning to drive these people away is a disaster for this country, and it is a double disaster that no one seems willing to talk about it. When Margaret Thatcher’s government cut the top rate of tax to 40 per cent in 1988, she was completing a series of reforms — beginning with the removal of exchange controls and followed by the Big Bang — that helped to establish London as the greatest financial centre on earth. Britain had been transformed from a sclerotic militant-ridden basket-case to a dynamic enterprise economy, and the capital became a global talent magnet. …So it is utterly tragic, at the end of the first decade of this century, that we are back in the hands of a government whose mindset seems frozen in the wastes of the 1970s.

By the way, I’m not picking on England. America is soon going to be making the same self-destructive mistake. Here’s my video on the broader subject of class-warfare tax policy.

You probably have heard about the University of California Regents voting yesterday for a 32-percent tuition hike over the next two years. Not surprisingly, many students are angry, some enough that they were arrested protesting outside the Regents’ meeting.

Now, a 32 percent hike over two years isn’t small. But here’s the thing: California has typically charged students very little relative to both state taxpayer funding and national averages. As you can see in the chart below, which uses data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, net per-pupil tuition revenue (meaning revenue from tuition minus any state financial aid) in California has hovered around $1,200 over the last 25 years, and has only gone up about $18 per year. Meanwhile, state taxpayers have been shelling out around $7,300 per pupil per year. So state taxpayers have been furnishing the vast majority of funding for California college students, and students have done very little to make up the vast gulf between what they pay and what taxpayers shell out.

How does California compare to the rest of the nation? On average for all states, net per-pupil revenue from students has risen from just about $2,000 to $4,000, putting the ever-growing average around $3,000, or close to three times what Golden State students have been furnishing. Funding from state and local taxpayers, meanwhile, has been just slightly lower nationally than in California.

So California students have been getting a heck of a deal, which is no doubt one among many reasons the state is on fiscal life support. Sooner or later bills come due, and that has left the state little choice but to make students pay more for the education of which they are by far the biggest beneficiaries.

Naturally — but still shamelessly — students are acting like victims now that the decrepit gravy train is slowing down a bit.  Unfortunately, the adults in charge of California colleges are also naturally — but perhaps even more shamelessly — stoking student anger so that they don’t have to do things that make their jobs less pleasant.

Despite the utterly unsustainable taxpayer funding for higher education that California has doled out for decades, for instance, UC president Mark Yudof had no qualms about declaring that:

We’re being forced to impose a user tax on our students and their families. This is a tax necessary because our political leaders have failed to adequately fund public higher education.

Last I checked, what a customer pays for a service is called a “price” not a “tax.” A tax is what has been used to make taxpayers bear by far the biggest part of California’s higher education burden while students have furnished but a token amount. And please don’t give us the “failed to adequately fund” line. UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau has been happily trotting out that disproven dreck in a grab for federal taxpayer dollars at the same time it has been discovered that he’s been pushing millions of dollars intended for academics and other purposes to Berkeley athletics.

It’s hard enough to accept the underfunding bit when the data clearly show it not to be the case. It’s even harder when college leaders spend their precious dollars on water polo and golf.

It’s time in California for the adults to stop acting like kids, and for the kids to start paying their share. But don’t get your hopes up, at least in higher education. It seems that no one there is without a shameless sense of entitlement.

According to Reuters, OMB Director Peter Orszag told reporters that the embarrassing figures from Medicare and Medicaid demonstrate the need for health care reform. I would concur if “reform” meant reducing the government’s role in health care. However, he means the opposite, which raises the question of how giving more money to an already waste-prone and bureaucratic federal health system can possibly make sense for the economy.

The administration has promised to cut down on improper payments with the aid of a new executive order. According to the Associated Press:

Under the executive order, every federal agency would have to maintain a Web site that tracks improper payments, error rates and outstanding payments. If an agency doesn’t meet targets for reducing error rates for two years in a row, the agency director and responsible official will have to directly report to OMB to explain the delinquency and new actions they will take.

Somehow I doubt this will amount to much of a deterrent. The AP also said the administration plans to impose penalties on government contractors who receive improper payments. But last month it was reported that “the Department of Defense awarded nearly $30 million in stimulus contracts to six companies while they were under federal criminal investigation on suspicion of defrauding the government.”

Democrat Tom Carper, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on federal financial management, seemed to partly understand the broader meaning of the improper payment estimates:

It goes without saying that these results would be completely unacceptable in the private sector, as they should be in government, especially at a time of record deficits…Unfortunately, these numbers may still be just the tip of the iceberg since they don’t even include estimates for several major programs, including the Medicare prescription drug plan.

Yes, Senator, which is precisely why bigger government – be it stimulus, bail outs, or health care reform – is an inferior option to letting the marketplace provide for our wants and needs.

Carper is also right about the $98 billion figure being the “tip of the iceberg.” As has been noted here before:

The Government Accountability Office estimates that the two major government health programs are currently losing a combined $50 billion annually to such payments. But that estimate probably low-balls the actual losses. Harvard’s Malcolm Sparrow, a top specialist in health care fraud, estimates that 20 percent of federal health program budgets are consumed by improper payments, which would be a staggering $150 billion a year for Medicare and Medicaid.

See this essay for more on fraud and abuse in government programs.

According to the Chamber of Commerce polls, strong majorities in every state they polled believe the health care bills will increase the deficit. In this case the public’s cynical instincts are almost certain to be more accurate than the computer models of the CBO. As David Dickson of the Washington Times reviewed yesterday, government health care programs have a history of cost overruns.

And not small overruns, like overdrawing your checking account — massive, order-of-magnitude cost overruns. Is that because politicians intentionally overstate the benefits and underestimate the costs of their proposals? Or just that computer models aren’t very good at predicting how entitlements programs change behavior? Either way, just look at the record: In 1967, the House Ways and Means Committee said the entire Medicare program would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual cost in 1990 was $98 billion. In 1987, Congress projected that Medicaid would make special relief payments to hospitals of less than $1 billion in 1992. The actual cost, just five years after the projection, was $17 billion. Similarly, Medicare’s home care benefit was projected in 1988 to cost $4 billion in 1993, but the actual cost — again, just five years after the projection — was $10 billion.

The government is running a trillion-dollar annual deficit already, and Congress and the president propose to create a new program that promises to cover millions more people with health insurance, drag currently insured people onto government programs, and save billions of dollars in the process. No wonder levels of trust in government are at record lows.

In addition to being theoretically misguided, critics sometimes blame Obama for things that are not his fault. Listening to a talk radio program yesterday, the host asserted that Obama tripled the budget deficit in his first year. This assertion is understandable, since the deficit jumped from about $450 billion in 2008 to $1.4 trillion in 2009. As this chart illustrates, with the Bush years in green, it appears as if Obama’s policies have led to an explosion of debt.

But there is one rather important detail that makes a big difference. The chart is based on the assumption that the current administration should be blamed for the 2009 fiscal year. While this makes sense to a casual observer, it is largely untrue. The 2009  fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. The budget for the entire fiscal year was largely set in place while Bush was in the White House. So is we update the chart to show the Bush fiscal years in green, we can see that Obama is partly right in claiming that he inherited a mess (though Obama actually deserves a small share of the blame for Bush’s last deficit since earlier this year he pushed through both an “omnibus” spending bill and the so-called stimulus bill that increased FY2009 spending).

It should go without saying that this post is not an argument for Obama’s fiscal policy. The current President promised change, but he is continuing the wasteful and profligate policies of his big-spending predecessor. That is where critics should be focusing their attention.

From the Associated Press:

The post office has been struggling to cope with a decline in mail volume caused by the shift to the Internet as well as the recession that resulted in a drop in advertising and other mail. Total mail volume was 177.1 billion pieces, compared to 202.7 billion pieces in 2008, a decline of almost 13 percent. For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 the agency had income of $68.1 billion, $6.8 billion less than in 2008. Expenditures were down $5.9 billion to $71.8 billion.

The recession and the rise in electronic communications are generating huge financial problems for the lumbering government monopoly. Despite its efforts to reduce headcount, the USPS remains overburdened by a costly and heavily unionized workforce. As I noted previously:

The average USPS worker earns $83,000 per year in compensation, which is considerably more than the average U.S. worker. And the Government Accountability Office recently noted that ‘compensation and benefits constitute close to 80 percent of USPS’s costs — a percentage that has remained similar over the years despite major advances in technology and the automation of postal operations.’

Radical reform is needed, but I suspect that Congress will just paper over the problems for now and also continue allowing the agency to defer funding its retirement obligations:

The post office is required to make an annual contribution of about $5 billion to pay in advance for medical benefits for future retirees. Congress reduced that by $4 billion for 2009, but that change was for one year only. The agency’s independent auditor, Ernst & Young, questioned whether the post office would have enough money to make the next payment on Sept. 30, 2010, when $5.5 billion will be due.

This will just kick the can down the road. It shows that even when Congress gets something right — as it did with making the USPS pre-fund its retiree health benefits — it lacks the will to see it through when the going gets tough. Meanwhile, the Europeans continue to make progress toward deregulating their national postal services and allowing for competition. Unfortunately, it seems that Congress only looks to Europe for guidance on expanding the welfare state.

There are, to be sure, ways some of these errors could have been avoided. As David Freddoso points out, it would have been trivial to design the backend to only permit legitimate congressional districts to be entered.  But again, getting the site up quickly means they can count on critics to point out those sorts of possibilities for improvement. That said, Freddoso surely has a point when he argues that there’s no sane reason this kludgy beast of a site should have cost $18 million. Far better would have been to take the open-source logic to its conclusion and simply dump the raw data on a server in XML format, then let outside groups—maybe the Sunlight Foundation or Americans for Tax reform or just some clever lone hacker—figure out how best to mash it up and present it.

In an essay for Cato Unbound on the issue of corporations and markets, libertarian theorist Roderick Long states: “Corporate power depends crucially on government intervention in the marketplace.” This dependency is on full display in an insightful Wall Street Journal story on General Electric’s overt efforts to hitch its future to billions of stimulus dollars.

The article is worth reading from start to finish, but here are some snippets:

The government has taken on a giant role in the U.S. economy over the past year, penetrating further into the private sector than anytime since the 1930s. Some companies are treating the government’s growing reach — and ample purse — as a giant opportunity, and are tailoring their strategies accordingly. For GE, once a symbol of boom-time capitalism, the changed landscape has left it trawling for government dollars on four continents.

‘The government has moved in next door, and it ain’t leaving,’ Mr. [GE CEO Jeffrey] Immelt said at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Montreal in June. “You could fight it if you want, but society wants change. And government is not going away.’

A close look at GE’s campaign to harvest stimulus money shows Mr. Immelt to be its driving force… Inside GE, he pushed his managers hard to devise plans for capturing government money.

By January, Mr. Immelt had become a leading corporate voice in favor of the $787 billion stimulus bill, supporting it in op-ed pieces and speeches. Reporters who called the Obama administration for information on renewable-energy provisions in the legislation were directed to GE.

When the stimulus package was rolled out, Mr. Immelt instructed executives leading the company’s major business units “to put together swat teams to get stimulus money, and [identify] who to fire if they don’t get the money,” says a person who heard him issue the instructions.

In February, a few days after President Obama signed the stimulus plan, GE lawyers, lobbyists and executives crowded into a conference room at GE’s Washington office to figure out how to parlay billions of dollars in spending provisions into GE contracts. Staffers from coal, renewable-energy, health-care and other business units broke into small groups to figure out “how to help companies” — its customers, in particular — “get those funds,” according to one person who attended.

It speaks poorly for American capitalism when one of the nation’s biggest economic engines is assembling “swat teams” to go after taxpayer money. Instead of corporate America trying to figure out what products and services to bring to the marketplace, big business is taking its cue from politicians and bureaucrats in Washington. This isn’t socialism; it’s state corporatism and it bodes ill for long-term economic growth.

See this essay for more on the problems with special-interest spending. Also see this essay on why the excuses for government interventions in energy markets fall short.

One result of the federal government paying for half or more is that it encourages the states to expand enrollment and benefits. It also makes it politically difficult to cut state Medicaid spending because of the accompanying loss of federal dollars.

A 2007 analysis on the exorbitant future costs of Medicaid by Jagadeesh Gokhale illustrates how the program’s price tag has skyrocketed since its creation in 1965 (see chart here). Over the decades, the states expanded their programs whenever the economy was growing and the tax revenues were flowing. When the economy went into recession and the revenue dried up, the states generally didn’t scale-back benefits and sometimes they asked for bailouts from the federal government. The 2009 stimulus package provided an estimated $87 billion in federal Medicaid money for the states.

If the economy remains stagnant over the next few years and state tax revenues fail to rebound, further pressure will mount on the federal government to continue bailing out state Medicaid programs. The nightmare scenario would be for the federal government to assume the full costs of Medicaid under state pressure.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget director, Michael Genest, recently raised the idea:

Genest, who is retiring at the end of the year, warned that California’s budget problems will persist even after the state works its way through this recession. He singled out Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid health-care program for the poor, as unaffordable for the state. If the program’s costs continue to climb 8 percent a year, the state will have little money left for anything other than schools and debt service by 2040, he said.

The health-care reform proposals now before Congress could further strain state budgets because they would expand Medicaid, Genest said.

Genest said Congress should overhaul Medicaid, now funded jointly by state and federal governments but run by the states. The federal government should cover more of the costs, give states more flexibility or even make a drastic switch and let federal officials take over Medicaid completely, he said.

“If you want to imagine a crisis, as a thought experiment, imagine all 50 states writing a letter to the federal government saying, ‘We’re no longer providing Medicaid.’ That would get Congress’ attention. And that’s about the only real leverage we have,” Genest said.

Current health care legislation in Congress threatens to increase state Medicaid spending. In the House passed bill, the federal government would pick up 100 percent of Medicaid’s expansion until 2015 when it would drop to 91 percent. However, the future is unpredictable and it’s not hard to imagine a future Congress keeping it at 100 percent federal funding.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the House bill also contains a provision that could be intended to create a justification for greater federal assumption of state Medicaid spending:

H.R. 3962 would require GAO to study federal matching payments made to state Medicaid programs to make recommendations on the FMAP formula to Congress. By February 15, 2011, GAO would be required to submit a report based on this study assessing the effect on the federal government, states, providers, and beneficiaries of making the following changes to the FMAP formula: (1) removing the 50% floor or 83% ceiling, or both and (2) revising the current FMAP formula to better reflect state fiscal capacity, state efforts to finance health and long-term care services, and to better adjust for national or regional economic downturns.

See this essay on the need for a return to fiscal federalism.

Update: The Washington Post reports this morning that the House health care reform bill contains an additional $23.5 billion Medicaid bailout for the states. The provision would extend by an additional six months (through 2011) the stimulus legislation’s “temporary” increase in the federal government’s share of total Medicaid spending.

• Export-Import Bank: Call it the “Boeing Bank”
• HUD: Federal Housing Administration woes continue and housing subsidies for the dead
• Transportation: High-speed rail lobbyists squabble over taxpayer loot

Also, in addition to losing more money, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lose their inspector general.

From the Journal:

Fannie Mae has about $109.5 billion of mortgage-insurance coverage in force, which represents 4 percent of all single-family home loans it owns or guarantees. Freddie Mac had $63.4 billion in mortgage insurance and $12.2 billion in bond insurance. Private mortgage insurance is required for any home loan with less than a 20 percent down payment, and the policies typically cover 12 percent to 35 percent of losses in the event of a default, according to HSH Associates, a financial publisher. Mortgage insurers have been forced to pay up as loan defaults escalate.

Escalating loan defaults are also likely to bite taxpayers through the Federal Housing Administration, which covers 100 percent of losses. The FHA is in deep trouble:

The reduction in private insurance coverage has contributed to the rise in the volume of loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration, a government mortgage insurer that backs loans with as little as 3.5 percent down payments. It could be required to ask for a federal subsidy for the first time in its 75-year history if the housing market deteriorates further.

Who is looking out for taxpayers here?

Ryan Grim at Huffington Post reports that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which is in charge of Fannie and Freddie, has used a legal technicality to rid itself of its inspector general:

There is no independent auditor overseeing the federal agency responsible for some $6 trillion in home mortgages, because the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled that the agency’s inspector general didn’t have authority to operate, according to internal memos obtained by the Huffington Post. The ruling came in response to a request from the Federal Housing Finance Agency itself — which means that a federal agency essentially succeeded in getting rid of its own inspector general.

The timing is curious:

Fannie and Freddie are burning through cash at a staggering rate. Fannie reported a loss of $18.9 billion in the third quarter of 2009, four billion more than it lost in the second quarter. FHFA requested $15 billion from Treasury to plug the hole. What’s it spending money on? “The company continued to concentrate on preventing foreclosures and providing liquidity to the mortgage market during the third quarter of 2009, with much of our effort focused on the Making Home Affordable Program,” boasts the press release accompanying the announcement of the massive loss. “As of September 30, 2009, approximately 189,000 Fannie Mae loans were in a trial period or a completed modification under the Home Affordable Modification Program.” Those are the precise programs that Kelley was looking into when his own agency shut him down.

See here for essays on the problems associated with the federal government’s housing market interventions. Also check out Johan Norberg’s book, Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis.

The audit found the following “significant weaknesses:”

• HUD and local agencies did not have effective policies related to deceased tenants.
• Local agencies did not provide accurate and reliable information to HUD.
• HUD and local agencies did not safeguard assets to ensure correct assistance payments.

This report is a small illustration of the fundamental problems with the federal government subsidizing local governments. The local public housing agencies are supposed to be monitoring how money is spent and reporting to HUD. HUD is supposed to be monitoring the local public housing agencies. But no one does a very good monitoring job, despite the piles of regulations and paperwork that every level of government has to deal with for such subsidies. The muddled web of responsibilities also makes it easy for fraud artists to take advantage.

Last week, HUD’s IG reported that the department is sending $220 million in stimulus funds to local agencies already known to misspend taxpayer dollars.

From USA Today:

The government is sending millions of dollars in stimulus aid to communities and housing agencies that federal watchdogs have concluded are unable to spend it appropriately, increasing the risk that the money will be wasted.

Since July, auditors working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general have scrutinized at least 22 cities, counties and housing authorities in 15 states and Puerto Rico to measure whether they can handle stimulus funds effectively. Only six, they found, could do so.

The rest — in line to receive more than $220 million in stimulus aid — had shortcomings ranging from poor management to inadequate staffing that threatened their ability to spend the money quickly and appropriately, a series of audit reports show.

According to a HUD spokesperson, the department is “spending millions of dollars to help local officials spend stimulus money effectively.” Maybe that’s true, but all monitoring help is a pure loss to taxpayers and the private sector economy.

Even when the federal oversight does find problems, the money often keeps flowing anyway. As the article notes:

USA TODAY reported in April that HUD planned to send $300 million in stimulus money to public housing authorities that had been repeatedly faulted by outside auditors for mishandling other forms of federal aid. Congress gave the Obama administration permission to withhold stimulus money from some of those agencies, but HUD opted earlier this year not to do so.

For more on fraud and abuse in federal programs, including housing subsidies, see this essay.

This issue includes Greek economists Michael Mitsopoulos and Theodore Pelagidis on “Vikings in Greece: Kleptocratic Interest Groups in a Closed, Rent-Seeking Economy” as well as Peter Leeson, author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, writing (with David Skarbek) on the effects of foreign aid. As for taxes, well, editor Jim Dorn has assembled a number of useful papers:

• Andrew T. Young on taxing, spending, and “fiscal illusion”
• Michael J. New on the “starve the beast” hypothesis
• Alan Reynolds on Paul Krugman’s misunderstanding of the monetary and fiscal lessons of the Great Depression and Japan’s lost decade

And on the general rapaciousness of the state, don’t miss Jason Kuznicki’s careful review of government racial discrimination from the end of Reconstruction until the civil rights movement.

To use a technical phrase, this is hogwash. This new 6-1/2 minute video, narrated by yours truly, gives 12 reasons why Obamacare will lead to higher deficits – including real-world evidence showing how Medicare and Medicaid are much more costly than originally projected.

By the way, this video doesn’t even touch on the mandate issue, which Michael Cannon explains is not being counted in order to make the cost of government-run healthcare less shocking.

Today, on page A19 we learn about a Small Business Administration subsidy program that has a 60-percent default rate. On the same page, we learn that the U.S. Postal Service will lose $7 billion this year.

Flipping over to page A20, we learn that former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik is a liar, a tax cheat, and thoroughly corrupt.

Then flip back to A15, and columnist Steve Pearlstein rightly lambastes the latest stimulus scheme from Congress: ”This $10 billion boondoggle is nothing more than a giveaway to the real estate industrial complex.”

Finally, on A14, we’ve got government-owned Fannie Mae losing a colossal $19 billion this year and asking the Treasury for another $15 billion taxpayer hand-out.

The federal government is a mess. Policymakers have no idea what the effects will be when they spend billions on scheme after scheme. Most of them don’t read the legislation, they don’t understand economics, and they never admit mistakes when their schemes almost inevitably fail. Fully 40 percent of the vast federal budget will be debt-fueled this year, but few policymakers seem to care. And public corruption seems never-ending. 

Isn’t it time to give libertarianism a chance?

• Commerce: corporate welfare in Ohio
• Defense: cost overruns in the Pentagon’s space programs
• Energy: central planners gamble with taxpayer money
• HUD: subsidizing private firms to operate public housing isn’t a solution

Also, dubious stimulus projects point to a need to return to fiscal federalism.

For those observations, economist Brad DeLong called me an “utter fool.”

Let me draw your attention to an article in the Washington Post today entitled “Corporate giants sit on piles of cash.” Nucor Steel is sitting on piles of cash that it is unwilling to invest. Nucor’s chief executive Daniel Dimicco explains:

Everything is still on hold because we don’t have a lot of confidence that the right things are being done in Washington to reinvigorate the economy.

To story goes on:

Nucor isn’t alone. The balance sheets of large U.S. corporations are for the most part in good shape. Many big companies have piles of cash on hand and credit markets have thawed so that they can raise new funds… But most U.S. executives lack enough confidence in the economy to expand their businesses.

The article explains how big businesses are “jittery” for various reasons, such as memories of last year’s credit crunch. It doesn’t mention President Obama’s policies, but at this point in the economic cycle when world growth is returning, the lack of excitement by U.S. businesses regarding domestic investment is very curious.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is giving them nothing to get excited about. The President is promising them higher health care costs, higher corporate taxes, more labor regulations, higher energy costs with cap-and-trade, and a lack of interest in further trade agreements.

The Post article says that some U.S. multinationals are using their hoards of cash to invest abroad, allowing them to avoid punitive treatment under the high-rate U.S. corporate income tax.

How do we get U.S. multinationals to start investing their “piles of cash” in the United States? Cut the U.S. corporate rate permanently to 15 percent, as I’ve described in Global Tax Revolution. With just about every other advanced economy having slashed their corporate rate in recent years, we are “utter fools” for not following suit, especially with the unemployment rate now topping 10 percent.

These workers make sure airplanes land and take off safely, and they typically top lists of this nature. The median 50% earned between $86,860-142,210, with good benefits. Air traffic controllers are eligible to retire at age 50 with 20 years of service, or after 25 years at any age.

Huge salaries and retirement after 20 years — sweet deal!

Air traffic controllers seem to provide a good illustration of my general claim that federal workers are overpaid.

I don’t know what the proper pay level for controllers is, but I do know that we should privatize the system, as Canada has, and let the market figure it out.

An explosive report released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in September said earnings of graduates were now at par and even lower than those of migrant laborers [italics added].

Wow! If this report is accurate, until now I have had no idea how truly ridiculous Washington’s obsession with pumping out more degrees to keep up with the Chinese has been — and I’ve been pretty sure it’s ridiculous! Much more troubling, if I’ve had little clue about the true extent of the absurdity, imagine how far from grasping it our government-loving federal politicians have been! Of course, as I wrote yesterday, even if they did know it, they probably wouldn’t let on.

The only thing I don’t like about this video is that I fear people may no longer want to watch the ones I narrate.

You’re a billionaire but you don’t want anyone, least of all the taxman, to know. What do you do? Head for a palm-fringed island paradise or a snow-covered Alpine micro-state? Wrong. The world’s most opaque jurisdictions – the ones that will best shield you and your cash from the light – are mostly in the heart of the most sophisticated and powerful global financial centres. London, Luxembourg and Zurich are in the top five most secretive jurisdictions, according the first comprehensive index of financial transparency ever compiled. Yet top of the pile, beating the British Virgin Islands, Belize or Liechtenstein as the best place to hide wealth, is Delaware. One of the smallest states in the US, it offers the best protection for anyone who does not want to disclose their identity as a beneficial owner of a company. That is one very good reason why the East Coast state hosts 50% of the US’s quoted firms and 650,000 companies – almost equivalent to one company per Delaware resident. …Delaware – the political power-base of the US vice-president, Joe Biden – offers high levels of banking secrecy and does not make details of trusts, company accounts and beneficial ownership a matter of public record. Delaware also allows companies to re-domicile within its borders with minimal disclosure, and allows the existence of privacy-enhancing “protected cell” or “segregated portfolio” companies, among many other stratagems useful for protecting the identity of those who do business there.

And what are the issues the Post thinks are important? Education, transportation, energy and environment, abortion, gun control, health care, and labor. All fine issues to debate.

But what about taxes? Or government spending? Or the size and scope of government? McDonnell’s television ads focus heavily on Deeds’s apparent willingness to raise taxes, and he’s been rising in the polls as those ads have run. Could it be that the voters think taxes are an important issue?

Turn to a front-page story on New York’s special congressional election, and you’ll find Todd Harris, who has been a media adviser to John McCain, Jeb Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now Marco Rubio, making this point: “A lot of the establishment Republicans underestimated the grass-roots anger across the country about spending and the expansion of the federal government.”

The Post wishes that taxes weren’t an issue in Virginia. In fact, the Post wishes that voters wanted their taxes raised. But wishing won’t make it so.