QUOTE OF THE DAY

Bloomberg: American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals

After being dismissed from her job as a Midtown Manhattan securities attorney in October 2009, Christina Tretter-Herriger hitched a used horse trailer to her Dodge Ram pickup and drove 1,628 miles to Texas.

The 32-year-old lawyer sold skin-care products in Houston before finding work as the assistant general counsel of a futures-trading firm where an irate customer punctuated a recorded voice-mail message with gunfire.

Fox News: New tax increases in California stir debate about adding to exodus

A vote last month that makes Californians among the highest-taxed residents in the country is sparking debate about whether the Democrat-back initiative will backfire, by forcing high-earners to join a long exodus from the cash-strapped state.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown successfully pushed the tax increase by suggesting that high-earners must shoulder the largest burden in bailing out the state, particularly its debt-ridden public school system.

However, high unemployment and government debt have already sent residents fleeing in large numbers – an estimated 225,000 annually for the past 10 years.

Forbes: We Don't Need Fed Bailouts, We Need Fed Sanity

In Mario Puzo’s novel, The Godfather, the Corleone family owned both construction companies that performed road repairs, and trucking companies that tore up the roads with overweight trucks.  The latter created business for the former, at the expense of taxpayers.

The federal government has been running a similar racket for a long time.  New government interventions are constantly being justified as needed to solve problems caused by previous government interventions.  New bureaucrats are hired to try to undo the damage caused by existing bureaucrats.  And, all of this activity has to be paid for by taxpayers.

NRO: Trade a millionaires’ surtax for a 28 percent corporate tax

When the Treasury Department scored the president’s ill-fated 2013 budget last February, it estimated that raising the top two personal-income-tax rates — to 36 from 33 percent and to 39.6 from 35 percent on incomes above $250,000 and $377,000, respectively — would raise just $23.1 billion in 2013, barely enough to finance federal spending for two days. In the fiscal-cliff negotiations, House speaker John Boehner capitulated on the higher 39.6 percent tax rate but hoped to confine it to incomes above $1 million. That idea — his Plan B — failed to get the votes of a majority of the House Republican caucus; but what will replace it?

Reason: The Auto Bailout Failure Is Now Complete

You may recall that during the presidential election, the Treasury Department refused requests by General Motors to unload the government's stake in the giant automaker.

Taxpayers had sunk $50 billion into a union bailout in 2009 and were now proud owners of 26.5 percent of the struggling company. Reportedly, GM had growing concerns that the stigma of "Government Motors" was hurting sales in the United States. At the time, any transaction would have come at a steep loss to taxpayers and undermined the president's questionable campaign assertions that the auto union rescue had been a huge success.