Links, 2-22-12

Rich Santorum garnered some attention after calling the idea of schools run by state or federal governments "anachronistic"

For the first 150 years, most presidents home-schooled their children at the White House, he said. “Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.” “Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

The Economist has a feature article on Cass Sunstein's efforts to streamline federal government regulations.

NJ Governor Chris Christie says Warren Buffet "should just write a check and shut up" if he thinks that the wealthy should pay higher taxes

Ruth Ann Dailey has "a civil solution to the same-sex marriage angst".  She writes that the problem with many gay marriage laws is that they result in "religious oppression" and make religious conservatives "second-class citizens".  She cites the case of DC which passed a gay marriage law requiring that "'every third party' recognize same-sex marriage as legitimate".  The result, she says, is that Catholic Charities ended it's foster care rather than allow gay couples to adopt babies and discontinued health insurance rather than provide coverage to gay spouses.  Her solution is for the government to offer only civil unions to all citizens, straight or gay, and for churches to choose which unions they recognize as marriage or not.  She says the approach has worked in California, where the San Francisco diocese now simply offers health insurance coverage to a "second adult" in the household "regardless of relationship".

Rick Santorum has polled ahead of Mitt Romney in the last six national polls, including leads of 10+ points in three of them.

Thomas Friedman writes that a third-party candidate is likely if the Republicans nominate Rick Santorum.

Mitt Romney spent far more money than he took in during the month of January, erasing his large lead in fundraising.

Frank Bruni writes that people are too focused on drugs when they discuss the deaths of Whitney Houston and Amy Whinehouse.  He says that alcohol does far more societal damage than do drugs but that nobody seems willing to confront the problem -- excise taxes have markedly declined over the past few decades in real dollars, for example.  Therefore, he argues, we need to level a pigovian tax on alcohol to account for these negative externalities.

President Obama wants to cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% but eliminate enough loopholes, exceptions, and subsidies to make the tax cut revenue neutral.

The economy looks like it's recovering, but there's always the danger that gas prices, local/state government funding cuts, turmoil in Europe, or some unforeseen shock (e.g. the Nuclear disaster in Japan last year) could derail growth.