Frankly, it is a bit of an embarrassment for many commentators that the (admittedly weak) recovery is coming right after the end of the fiscal stimulus. Of course this does not refute the standard account of fiscal policy, namely that it can work but is hard to pull off politically in a manner which contributes to sustainable growth. The correct answer for the timing of recovery, relative to the end of stimulus, is “confounding factors,” but that is exactly the point. The confounding factors are more important than we had thought, and the fiscal stimulus not quite as important as we had been led to believe. That is another point against the Old Keynesian view.

The Catholic Church objected and asked for an exception for insurance plans provided to employees of Catholic churches, colleges and charities.

The administration did make one strange exception, however. They said that if the religious organization doesn’t serve people of different faiths—if they only serve their own—then they are not covered by this rule.

Set aside your feelings, one way or the other, about birth control. I see no moral issue with it, while others do. Look at the substance of what this decision means: it is the federal government forcing religious institutions to either violate their beliefs, discriminate against people of other faiths, or be unable to operate. There is no other choice.

Ross Douthat commented about the absurdity of this:

Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”

The administration’s decision—and health care reform itself—is bizarre in its lack of consideration of ramifications, but it’s also dangerous. If the federal government can mandate that religious organizations violate their own beliefs—force them to provide something to their employees which is squarely immoral for them—why can’t the federal government also mandate that all organizations involved in women’s health also teach a class on abstinence? Or that all private schools must incorporate intelligent design into their biology courses?

That sounds absurd, because it is, but I see no substantive difference between the law requiring one and the law requiring the other. What principle distinguishes them?

The economy does seem to be gaining some momentum, and while it’s still not strong (and we have a huge hole to climb out of), that’s absolutely good news. Hopefully Europe can remain stable enough to allow the economy to strengthen.

So it is unfair to say that Scalia overemphasizes trespassing. His argument is more subtle. To suggest that he overemphasizes physical intrusion would be to make the same mistake the lower court makes, i.e., to assume that a test used in one particular case is the only test.

The multinationals’ minimum tax would be entirely unworkable. Even if Congress passed the levy, which it won’t, those firms will find ways around it. Minimum taxes are Band-Aides for a flawed tax system. The solution is not to create a new penalty for firms that learn to manipulate the law, it is to fix the basic law in the first place.

If Obama wants to prevent companies from gaming the system, he could lower the corporate rate and eliminate tax preferences. He raised this in last year’s state of the union address but did nothing about it. That’s too bad. With a low enough domestic tax rate, companies would have less incentive to shuffle income overseas.

This proposal in particular was bewildering. Obama (rightly) acknowledges that American companies face one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world, and it hurts our competitiveness. His solution, perplexingly, is to tax multinational companies a minimum tax rate, while using it (apparently) to lower the tax rate on companies which hire more people in the U.S.

This proposal symbolizes the administration’s general approach: use law to punish people. Instead of lowering our corporate tax rate to be more competitive, Obama wants to increase taxes on companies that don’t repatriate income, and then provide deductions or tax credits (“tax loopholes,” as the president is wont to call them) to companies that stay here to make the too-high corporate tax rate more palatable.

He needs to think through this a bit more. He derides a complex tax system which allows individuals and companies to pay “too low” of an effective tax rate, yet here he is trying to make the problem worse.

Another piece of the puzzle is that Mr. Buffett’s tax burden is larger than it first appears, because he is a major shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway.

When the C.B.O. studies the tax burden, it includes all federal taxes, including individual income taxes, payroll taxes and corporate income taxes. In its analysis, payroll taxes are borne by workers, and corporate taxes by the owners of capital. For the richest 1 percent of the population, 9.3 percentage points of their 31.1 percent tax rate comes from the taxes that corporations have paid on their behalf. The corporate tax would undoubtedly loom large if the C.B.O. were to calculate Mr. Buffett’s effective tax rate.

The more serious peril, though, has to do with policy rather than politics. A campaign narrative premised on more places this administration on a collision course not just with the Republican Party, but with budgetary arithmetic itself.

Here is the upshot. Five Justices join the holding of the “majority” opinion (per Scalia) that by attaching and monitoring a GPS device the police conduct a “search”; four Justices (those in the Alito concurrence) reject that view. Five Justices join or express their agreement with the portion of the “Alito” opinion concluding that the long-term monitoring of a GPS device violates a reasonable expectation of privacy; four Justices (those in the majority, minus Sotomayor) leave that question open.

That alignment of Justices importantly leaves two questions unanswered. First, does the “search” caused by installing a GPS device require a warrant? The answer may be no, given that no member of the Court squarely concludes it does and four members of the Court (those who join the Alito concurrence) do not believe it constitutes a search at all.

Second, assuming no warrant is required for installation, is a warrant required for short-term monitoring of the GPS device? Again, the answer may be no, as the majority conspicuously avoids addressing this issue and four members of the Court (again, those who join the Alito concurrence) squarely say that the answer is “no” (Alito op. at 13). Justice Sotomayor alone says that this scenario “will require particular attention.”

(Via .)

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search’ ” under the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, Scalia wrote.

That it took the Supreme Court to decide that placing a GPS tracking device on someone’s car—for a month—should require a warrant is a statement to just how bad a state we are in.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a similar (and more egregious case) in 2010, where the DEA not only tracked a person’s car without a warrant, but trespassed on his property to place it on his car. They ruled in favor of the government.

Among the pieces of good news in Friday’s report: the drop in the jobless rate came largely from real gains, not from discouraged workers giving up the job hunt. The new jobs were spread broadly across industries, with transportation and warehousing, retail, manufacturing and restaurants all hiring.

200,000 jobs is significant, too, because it’s more than the 125,000 jobs or so a month required to keep up with population growth. We need much more growth than that to dig ourselves out of the hole the 2007-2009 recession dug, but at this point, any growth is positive.