Speaking of the U.S. debt, as we did in our last post — Keith Hennessy, who was a senior White House economic advisor to President George W. Bush, wrote a lengthy post on his blog a couple of weeks ago criticizing President Obama’s description of the Bush years as a “decade of profligacy.” One argument, [...]

“Recent trends in credit default swap markets show a clearly discernable uptick in the perceived likelihood of default on 5-year U.S. senior Treasury debt, a notion that was virtually unthinkable in the past.” Cited in today’s front page New York Times article on the inability of government to address the mounting national debt is research [...]

Some surprising info on this Mint.com chart of which income levels pay what percentage of U.S. income taxes. 47% of American households on the lower end, for example, pay no taxes, while 2% on the upper end pay 40% of all income taxes. Fair? On the other hand, this chart from the book Who Rules [...]

For good or for ill, the Senate got ‘er done. With all the hubub over the removed public option, the failed Medicare buy-in gambit, and differing approaches between the House and Senate on abortion restrictions, a very important part of the bill has been lost in the shuffle:

The tanning tax.

After the nip and tuck lobby complained about a tax on cosmetic surgeries that Harry Reid had inserted into the bill (the “Bo-tax”), he took it out and replaced it with a 10% tax on tanning salons.

If the tanning industry wants to kill the tax in the House-Senate conference, they’ll probably need more of a campaign than this online call-to-action from the Indoor Tanning Association, which has a circa-1997 look-and-feel to it.

It may feel strange to be talking about tanning on Christmas Eve, but reaction on the Web is coming fast and furious.