Treating variables as constants is a sign of a damaged brain. In the real world, almost any action taken by government is going to cause a behavioral response - and often one that is not intended. Wise people think through what is likely to happen with any given action. Unfortunately, the ongoing lame-duck Congress and the administration are again demonstrating the shortage of wise people. Many Democrats, including many lame ducks, are still demanding that tax rates for entrepreneurs be increased under the absurd claim that not to do so will "cost" the government "almost $2 trillion over the 2011-20 period" in lost tax revenues. To believe these bogus numbers that the Joint Tax Committee staff and the administration put out about the revenue loss, one needs to believe these variables are constant:

Right about now Attorney General Eric Holder should be planning his return to private practice, or someone in the White House should be planning it for him. Last week (11/17), a jury in Manhattan acquitted Ahmed Ghailani of all but one of 285 counts he was charged with for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in which 224 people were killed. Terrorists such as Mr. Ghailani, who was born in Tanzania and was captured in Pakistan, have no business being tried in a U.S. courtroom, afforded the same constitutional protections as are U.S. citizens.  Yet Mr. Holder insists they be.  More serious than his interference in national security policy, however, are his apparent violations of the law.  Soon enough, without the protection of a Democrat Congress, Attorney General Holder may find himself being prosecuted.

After his humiliating Asian trip -- where foreign leaders at the G20 summit in Seoul treated him as if he had a social disease -- President Barack Hussein Obama is desperate for something that could be spun as a foreign policy "triumph." That's why he's pressing so hard to have the Senate ratify in the lame schmuck session the nuclear arms reduction treaty (New START ) he negotiated with Russia last Spring. This is a bad idea, for several resons, one of which is that he thinks it will further his fantasy of a nuclear free world.  A nuclear free United States would be a nightmare for us in a world in which China and Pakistan have the bomb, and North Korea, Iran and Venezuela(!) aggressively are pursuing it.  It's time for Mr. Obama to wake up from his dream and smell the radioactive coffee.

He's a soft spoken, mild mannered academic who means well (I think).  But he could be the most dangerous man in America. He is Ben Bernanke, formerly of Princeton, now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and he is making most of us poorer.  The Fed has the power to manipulate the money supply, which is a dangerous power for government to have. "Government," said the economist Ludwig von Mises, "is the only agency which can take a useful commodity like paper, slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless." Mr. Bernanke's plans for "quantitative easing" (creating money out of thin air) won't make our dollars worthless.  But it will make them worth less -- about 20 percent less, thinks Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest mutual fund. There are other serious people who think that 20% inflation caused by our government's gargantuan creation of imaginary money is at least an order of magnitude too low.

Was our great financial crisis caused by greedy and reckless bankers and Wall Street players?  Or by a broad range of individuals, financial institutions and governments who became less risk-averse and prudent?  Or by government housing policies that brought on the housing bubble and mismanaged the risks? Without waiting for the evidence, many in the political class, and particularly those on the left, immediately bought into the argument that the financial crisis was caused by greed. This view of the cause provided much of the political energy behind the passage this year of the Dodd-Frank Act, also known as the financial reform act. Peter J. Wallison, a former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury and now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has debunked this argument, conclusively showing in a study that Barney Frank's government housing policies caused the crisis.

The most important issue to be dealt with in the lame duck session of Congress is whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, which are due to expire in January. If the Bush tax cuts expire, the current six income tax rates of 10 percent, 15 percent, 25 percent, 28 percent, 33 percent and 35 percent would be replaced by five rates of 15 percent, 28 percent, 31 percent, 36 percent and 39.6 percent. Letting all the tax rates cuts expire would strip at least a percentage point from an already anemic growth forecast for next year, predicts Goldman Sachs. Aside from the immediate economic consequences, the debate over the Bush tax cuts will indicate how willing President Barack Hussein Obama is to compromise with Republicans, who will take over the House of Representatives in January. It will also indicate how trustworthy Mr. Obama's word is at a time when Republicans feel they can trust him about as far as they can toss him across the Potomac River.

As someone who has been privileged to attend all ten TTP Rendezvous, I hugely enjoyed the recent Victory Rendezvous in our nation's capital.  When I told Jack about "software that predicts the future," he asked me to give a presentation on it - then be sure and write it up so that all TTPers would know. So let me tell you about a small company in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Recorded Future.  CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a Ph.D in computer science, heads a 16-man team that uses extremely efficient data mining to generate a consortium of data points with fascinating predictive power. Here is how it works.