Joel Mathis

At National Review , Rich Lowr y is grumpy: Over at PowerLine, John Hinderaker makes a great catch: CNN describes the Arizona immigration law as "polarizing." John asks why the health-care bill was never described that way, even though it too brought protestors into the streets and was actually, in contrast to the Arizona bill, opposed by most people? To ask the question is to answer it. I sent Mr. Lowry a note: A Google search for "health care bill polarizing" gets 476,000 results . A GoogleNews search for the same term gets more than 600 results . You say that "to ask the question is to answer it," but trying to answer it might've provided you a different result.

Daniel Foster points to this Hill story , showing that Obama's health reform bill will actually sock the middle class with tax increases. The bolded parts are Foster's emphases: Taxpayers earning less than $200,000 a year will pay roughly $3.9 billion more in taxes — in 2019 alone — because of healthcare reform, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress' official scorekeeper for legislation. The new law raises $15.2 billion over 10 years by limiting the medical expense deduction, a provision widely used by taxpayers who either have a serious illness or are older. Taxpayers can currently deduct medical expenses in excess of 7.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. Starting in 2013, most taxpayers will only be allowed to deducted expenses greater than 10 percent of AGI. Older taxpayers are hit by this threshold increase in 2017. Once the law is fully implemented in 2019, the JCT estimates the deduction limitation will affect 14.8 million taxpayers — 14

Some of my more thoughtful conservative friends have criticized President Obama's bigger initiatives -- like the health reform law -- from a "first principles" argument that economic liberty is the foundation of, well, liberty liberty. Any governmental act that interferes with the rights of individuals to their property or profit is a reduction of liberty and thus potentially a step down the slippery slope to tyranny. I think it's an insightful argument, but I also think it's got limits. And I think those limits might be demonstrated by the Heritage Foundation's 2010 Index of Economic Freedom . What's notable is that the two "countries" ranked highest on the index -- Hong Kong and Singapore -- might be great places to make cash, but they're not what most Americans would think of as substantially "free." (The United States ranks ninth.) Hong Kong might be listed as a separate "country" for the purposes of the index, but i

Via Paul Krugman , a graphical representation of how the two Bush tax cuts, the Iraq War and the new health reform law impact the federal budget: Stuff like this is why it's so hard for me not to think of the Tea Partiers as, essentially, sore losers .

I thought this was interesting framing by Newt Gingrich in this morning's Washington Post : But former Republican House speaker  Newt Gingrich  said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the  Democratic Party  for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. As writer Dan Balz notes in the next paragraph, "no one doubts that Johnson was right to push for those civil rights measures." No one does now of course -- at least not openly, if they wish to participate in mainstream politics -- but the reason the civil rights legislation was so devastating for the Democratic Party over time was that there were plenty of people who did think it was wrong for Johnson to push for those measures. What does this have to do with the