In today’s Wall Street Journal, Stanford economics professor Edward Lazear provides an economist’s view of the California drought situation:

My mom recently handed me a large bag of stamps she had collected as a child. There are thousands of stamps from about 100 countries, most from the 1910s to the 1950s. It’s a treasure trove.

My Daily Caller op-ed today looks at the website of a typical modern politician, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY). His site is designed to impress voters and the media in his district with all the federal benefits he has brought home. Maloney is taking a pork and constituent service approach to gaining reelection.

Infrastructure is in the news as policymakers face a deadline to pass a new highway bill. President Obama visited the Tappan Zee Bridge yesterday and said that “rebuilding America … shouldn’t be a partisan issue,” and then cast blame on the Republicans.

For the fourth day in a row, the Arkansas House of Representatives has refused to approve the yearly appropriation for its Medicaid program, dubbed the “private-option.” If the legislature continues this refusal and reverses its decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, state and federal taxpayers will save billions of dollars, making the Little Rock legislative battle the most important spending fight in the country.

New leadership is coming to the congressional tax-writing committees. Ron Wyden will be taking the helm of Senate Finance and Paul Ryan will be likely taking the helm of Ways and Means. This is good news, as both gentlemen are serious legislators and very interested in major tax reform.

I have posted a new essay on federal worker pay. The essay gathers together ideas and data from my recent blogs on the topic.

House Republicans proposed some small cuts to the federal budget on their new YouCut website last week. I noted that the GOP cuts amounted to just 0.017 percent of the federal budget, and suggested that the conservative party in Congress could do much better. Below I’ve listed 10 terminations that would save about $380 billion a year, which is more than 10 percent of total federal spending.

 1. Additional federal spending transfers resources from the more productive private sector to the less productive public sector of the economy. The bulk of federal spending goes toward subsidies and benefit payments, which generally do not enhance economic productivity. With lower productivity, average American incomes will fall.

The Federal Aviation Administration is trying to implement a $35 billion overhaul of the nation’s air traffic control system that would replace old-fashioned radar technology with modern satellite-based GPS navigation. But according to the Associated Press: