While we here in the Budget Brigade are thankful that our respective alma mates are poised to clinch BCS bowl berths (hook 'em, Horns!), we are even more thankful that President Elect Obama has serious concerns about the current BCS system. That's change we can believe in!

The Budget Brigade will return to the BudgetBlog on Monday.

Have a great Thanksgiving and enjoy the day.

Image by Flickr user Jennifer13 used under a Creative Commons license.

When going to Washington to ask Congress for $25 billion to help you out of jam because your company is going bankrupt, it's probably best to leave the private jet at home.

...the chief executives of the Big Three automakers opted to fly their company jets to the capital for their hearings this week before the Senate and House -- an ill-timed display of corporate excess for a trio of executives begging for an additional $25 billion from the public trough this week.

"There's a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hands," Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.) advised the pampered executives at a hearing yesterday. "It's almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high-hat and tuxedo. . . . I mean, couldn't you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here?"

The Big Three said nothing, which prompted Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) to rub it in. "I'm going to ask the three executives here to raise their hand if they flew here commercial," he said. All still at the witness table. "Second," he continued, "I'm going ask you to raise your hand if you're planning to sell your jet . . . and fly back commercial." More stillness. "Let the record show no hands went up," Sherman grandstanded.

Image by Flickr user kilobar used under a Creative Commons license.

The National Journal has been reporting this week that current Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Peter Orszag is in line to head up the Office of Management and Budget in the upcoming Obama administration. Orszag formerly served as a senior economic adviser during the Clinton administration and held a post in the economics studies program at the Brookings Institution.

Orszag has been impressive in his two year stint as the head of the CBO, which he began in January, 2007 and I think he would be an excellent choice to run the OMB for Obama. BudgetBlog readers will certainly know that we have high esteem for Dr. Orszag.

It's up from 6.1 percent in September to 6.5 percent in October. Also according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost 240,000 jobs in October, as the year-to-date number of jobs shed rose to 1.2 million.

October's drop in payroll employment followed declines of 127,000 in August and 284,000 in September, as revised. Employment has fallen by 1.2 million in the first 10 months of 2008; over half of the decrease has occurred in the past 3 months. In October, job losses continued in manufacturing, construction, and several service-providing industries. Health care and mining continued to add jobs.

The unemployment rate rose by 0.4 percentage point to 6.5 percent in October, and the number of unemployed persons increased by 603,000 to 10.1 million. Over the past 12 months, the number of unemployed persons has increased by 2.8 million, and the unemployment rate has risen by 1.7 percentage points.

A paper released last month by tax guru Joel Slemrod and Andrew Johns of the IRS analyzing "newly available data from the IRS's most recent comprehensive study of individual income tax noncompliance, the National Research Program, [assesses] the distributional consequences of income tax noncompliance in the U.S. federal income tax for the tax year 2001."

Slemrod and Johns find that "the ratio of aggregate misreported income to true income generally increases with income, although it peaks among taxpayers with adjusted gross income between $500,000 to $1,000,000, and is lower than the peak ratio for individuals with income above $1,000,000."

In other words, the biggest tax cheats earn $500,000 to $1,000,000.

And yet, in 2007, over 36 percent of all individual income tax audits (see table 9) performed by the IRS were on returns of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) claimants. And with the income ceiling for EITC eligibility is $37,783, I'm not so sure that this is very best strategy the IRS could pursue.

Writing in The New Yorker, Steve Coll meditates on the significance of the reactions certain political élites who are now lining up in favor using the government to better the economy.

The country is fortunate in one respect: the sudden buckling of financial safeguards has put just about everyone in touch with his inner New Dealer. Even Alan Greenspan recently confessed to Congress a crisis of faith in self-regulation. Meanwhile, former free-market true believers in the Bush Administration have tossed out money from the public vault like looters...

[...]

Embedded in this festival of emergency measures, however, is an important and possibly durable ideological shift. Last week, in an op-ed in the Washington Post, Martin Feldstein, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Reagan Administration, and, more recently, an adviser to John McCain, endorsed large-scale spending on public works as a way to stimulate economic recovery....The essay's appearance indicated that a broad coalition is emerging, where none existed a year ago, in favor of New Deal-style expenditures on roads, bridges, broadband lines, alternative energy, and the like, to support economic recovery and future growth.

If Coll's observation proves durable, then there will be greater political elbowroom -- to a greater or lesser extent depending on the outcome of today's contests, but room nonetheless -- to strengthen public investments.

If you had your say, what would you move to the top of the agenda?

Email us at , and let us know.