Below are a couple of interesting slides from Shibley Telhami’s latest polling in the Islamic world (click for larger versions):

Taxpayers can breathe a sign of relief. According to the Tax Foundation, April 23 is Tax Freedom Day. That means that the average American has finally earned enough to pay estimated federal, state, and local taxes for 2008. One of the most depressing finding in the Tax Foundation’s report is that Americans pay more in tax than they do for food, clothing, and shelter combined. To compensate for being the bearer of bad fiscal news, the Tax Foundation released an amusing video. It doesn’t quite equal this classic tax video, but it’s worth watching.

The Washington Examiner reports on how carefully your taxpayer dollars are spent by both federal and local governments:

The District of Columbia has agreed to pay $1.75 million to head off a lawsuit alleging that the city bilked the federal government out of money to educate children who didn’t exist, The Examiner has learned.

For decades, District schools took in millions of dollars in grants to educate the children of migrant farmworkers and fishermen. But, as first reported by The Examiner in August, a 2005 audit discovered there were no such children in the system.

According to HealthLeaders Media:

South Carolina-based Companion Global Healthcare added three Singapore hospitals to its network. The deal now allows Americans access to medical and surgical services at ParkwayHealth operated hospitals at pre-negotiated, in-network rates lower than those of U.S. hospitals…

David Williams, consultant and cofounder of MedPharma Partners LLC[, notes,] “It may be a bit of a wake-up call to the local hospitals in South Carolina, putting them on notice that they are facing a broader set of competitors.”

More than one million members of Blue Cross Blue Shield and BlueChoice HealthPlan of South Carolina now have access to the three Singapore hospitals—Mount Elizabeth, Gleneagles, and East Shore—at preferred network rates. The hospitals are accredited by the Joint Commission International, the affiliate of The Joint Commission.

Competition is healthy. (You know what? That’s catchy.)

I’m sitting at the 5th annual World Health Care Congress listening to George Shultz and others debate the merits of the presidential candidates’ health care reform plans. 

Rep. Jim Cooper (D‑TN), speaking for Sen. Barack Obama’s (D‑IL) plan, noted that Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D‑NY) plan would not get a single Republican co-sponsor because it includes an individual mandate. 

Speaking for Sen. Clinton’s plan, former (Bill) Clinton health policy advisor Christoper Jennings responded that there are plenty of Republicans on the individual-mandate bill sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D‑OR) and Bob Bennett (R‑UT). And not just Republicans, but conservative Republicans.

So much for that talking point.

Cato scholars have increasingly been evaluating the respective policies of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. The trade shop understandably prefers McCain (see my colleague Sallie James’s new paper), as does, cautiously, our director of health and welfare studies, Michael Tanner. The foreign policy shop, meanwhile, doesn’t like McCain because he is “wedded to perpetual war” and generally given to neoconservative tendencies.

On judges, I’ll go with the trade and health care folks: While John McCain’s views on the First Amendment are unacceptable to freedom-lovers of any stripe, he has at least promised to nominate Supreme Court justices in the mold of John Roberts and Sam Alito (who have ruled against campaign finance restrictions). Obama and Clinton, meanwhile, are in the John Paul Stevens camp of relying on empathy, international opinion, and “my own experience” as a basis for constitutional interpretation.

Indeed, while defending his vote against Chief Justice Roberts’s confirmation, Obama explained that his standard for a justice must be “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”

As Jonah Goldberg says in a devastating column, “Now that is a pure expression of the principle of judicial fiat.”

Supreme Court justices take an oath to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States under the Constitution and laws of the United States, so help me God.” Any contention that justices must tilt toward any particular type of party — the downtrodden (or privileged), the politically unpopular (or popular), the ethnic minority (or majority) — is an argument for judicial dictatorship instead of the rule of law.

As Roberts said when Senator Richard Durbin (D‑IL) asked him whether he would be “for the little guy,” if the law says the little guy wins, then the little guy should win — and if the law says the big guy wins, then it would be a miscarriage of justice to rule for the little guy. And those who don’t like that result should complain to their elected officials and get the law changed.

Economists Jonathan Klick and Thomas Stratmann find that it does. In the latest issue of the Journal of Law and Economics, they write:

In the face of rising rates of diabetes, many states have passed laws requiring health insurance plans to cover medical treatments for the disease. Although supporters of the mandates expect them to improve the health of diabetics, the mandates have the potential to generate a moral hazard to the extent that medical treatments might displace individual behavioral improvements. Another possibility is that the mandates do little to improve insurance coverage for most individuals, as previous research on benefit mandates has suggested that mandates often duplicate what plans already cover. To examine the effects of these mandates, we employ a triple-differences methodology comparing the change in the gap in body mass index (BMI) between diabetics and nondiabetics in mandate and nonmandate states. We find that mandates do generate a moral hazard problem, with diabetics exhibiting higher BMIs after the adoption of these mandates.