Quick hits

• On the flight out here to California I read some of Nigel Lawson's The View From Number Eleven, a memoir of his time serving as chancellor and other high-level positions under Margaret Thatcher. He mentioned that under his tenure the British government switched from four year budget projections to three, because the fourth year rarely had any grounding in reality and was essentially useless. Paul Krugman, meanwhile, recently praised the Obama Administration for switching from five year projections to ten.

• At the Salt Lake City airport I was briefly subjected to CNN and saw a segment on Anderson Cooper 360 in which a correspondent decided to see what it was like to live on food stamps for a month at the maximum allowance of something like $176. At the end of the segment Cooper interviewed the correspondent who talked about how hard it was to get enough nutrition on such an amount and how he lost 10 pounds during the month, showing off the looseness of his pants for emphasis. This, of course, explains why the poor in this country are universally emaciated and the slimmest demographic in our population...

• Heard about this today on the radio:

President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden today announced the release of $28 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to states and local transportation authorities to repair and build highways, roads and bridges. This investment will lead to 150,000 jobs saved or created by the end of 2010. The President and Vice President were joined at the Department of Transportation by Secretary Ray LaHood.

...Projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will bear a newly-designed emblem. The emblem is a symbol of President Obama’s commitment to the American people to invest their tax dollars wisely to put Americans back to work.

So, everything old is new again:

More bold thinking from the Obama Administration.