A reader writes in to recommend this Urban Institute report on how young children fare in the federal budget. Here’s some bullets of particular interest:

— The nation’s 12.5 million infants and toddlers received 2.1 percent—$44.1 billion—of federal domestic spending in 2007, while representing 4.2 percent of the population.

— Early care and education programs, essential to many children’s successful development and costly to provide for this age group, make up a relatively small share of the expenditures on infants and toddlers. Just 7 percent of federal spending on infants and toddlers was for Early Head Start, Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and child care assistance.

— In contrast, a vast amount of spending (61 percent) on infants and toddlers is driven by Medicaid and tax expenditure programs.

I think there’s often a lack of real focus in American policy debates on what you get in exchange for spending. Early childhood investments can produce large economic benefits if the programs deliver high quality services. Under the circumstances, it makes sense to do a lot more in this regard, and to do it with real attention to quality.

Via Joe Romm, an excellent graphic on the Waxman-Markey bill from the World Resources Institute that clarifies an important part about the bill—in the short-term, much of the work is being done by the bill’s “complementary policies” rather than the cap-and-trade as such:

In part, this reflects the reality that the climate pollution is going to be relatively inelastic over the short term. Our energy usage patterns are tied up in our existing stock of power plants, houses, roads, automobiles, and consumer durable goods. Over time, a clear and consistent price signal will shift us to a much more sustainable level of emissions. But price won’t change much in the very short term. So more direct policies targeting efficiency and clean energy are hugely important.

Consequently, when you look at Waxman-Markey comprehensively, it’s stronger on the short-term than just looking at the cap-and-trade provisions would lead you to believe. And as for the long-term, well, the long-term is important. But we’re obviously going to revisit our energy policy again between now and 2025, so flaws in the far-out years aren’t so significant. It’s better to get the out years right, of course, but there’s plenty of time to make changes there if necessary.

I don’t have any special insight into today’s command shake-up in Afghanistan, but I like it. It seems to me that if you have a new administration implementing a new strategy in an ongoing war, that it makes perfect sense that a new person would be brought it to implement it. General McChrystal’s area of specialty is apparently in special operations and he’s well-versed in counterinsurgency; that all seems very appropriate given the strategy the administration’s outlined for Afghanistan.

Interestingly, according to Spencer Ackerman there wasn’t really any huge trouble with General McKiernan: “I’ve heard grumblings about McKiernan being slow to adapt to the complexities of the Afghanistan war, but nothing that you’d hang your hat on, or rise to the level of outright dissatisfaction.”

One way to read that is that there must be some hidden problem. But optimistically, I think it’s just evidence of good decision-making. If McKiernan wasn’t the best man for the job, then replacing him with someone who Robert Gates and David Petraeus believed would do a better job is the right call. There’s no reason to have waited around with a non-optimal commander in place merely because he hadn’t done anything egregious.

Via Dave Weigel, an unusually useful poll from Rasmussen Reports:

Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29 percent) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17 percent think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30 percent) have no idea.

The political press has a very strong structural bias toward overestimating the extent to which the public has real opinions about hot political issues. I wish more pollsters would put these kinds of polls in the field that do something to probe the extent of public ignorance. Polls that attempt to directly probe the public’s views about cap and trade wind up measuring a lot of pseudo-opinion. As you can see right in this result, people are incredibly unwilling to admit that they “don’t know” something or other. Thus 46 percent of the public says they know what cap and trade is about even though they don’t, in fact, know what it’s about.

I’ve heard that there’s some disappointment in the administration that they haven’t gotten the level of progressive love they feel they deserve for their ambitious proposals to curb abusive corporate tax loopholes. These are the kind of issues where, if it’s hashed out behind closed doors, the bad guys are destined to win. But if the fight turns public, the good guys will win. Pat Garofalo observes that congressional critics of the plans don’t have much to say for themselves, with Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) simply saying he’s “wary because the tax changes would hurt Citigroup Inc., his New York district’s largest private-sector employer.”

As far as bad reasons for doing something go, note that this one is unusually bad. The NY-7 isn’t like some huge swathe of Nebraska where people depend on in-district employment. It’s primarily composed of a residential section of Queens—itself a part of America’s densest city—and the vast majority of Crowley’s employed constituents will either commute to out-of-district jobs or else work in small neighborhood businesses.

But it’s worth taking a look at how absurd some of the abuses the administration is trying to curb are. Take, for example, the “check the box” rule. The Washington Post described this as “a Clinton-era rule known as ‘check the box,’ which permits firms to more easily transfer cash between countries.”

It’s important to note, however, that this isn’t a reversal of some deliberate Clinton administration strategy. Instead, what happened is that the Clinton administration promulgated a rule that was designed to simplify the classification of different kinds of subsidiaries. Within months of the rule coming out, the career civil servants in the Treasury Department noted that there was potentially a huge tax loophole here. The way it works is that a multinational company can set up two subsidiaries, one Acme Corp Cayman Islands and the other Acme Corp Germany. Then it sets up a Cayman Islands holding company, whose job is to own both subsidiaries. Then in order to make sure that the subsidiary located in high-tax Germany registers no profits, they have Acme Corp Germany take out high interest loans from Acme Corp Cayman Islands. This has the impact of ensuring that even though the business activity undertaken in Germany is generating all of the profits, they register as being untaxed Cayman Islands profits. Then you “check the box” and make the subsidiaries all disappear into the holding company.

That’s dumb. Which is why as soon as it was noted, an effort was put in place to change it. But a ferocious lobbying battle opened up, with the apologists for tax havens arguing that, basically, it was Germany’s ox that was getting gored here so Americans shouldn’t care. Over the years, however, that turns out to be wrong. The availability of this loophole is a significant incentive for companies to invest in their overseas subsidiaries and take advantage of the tax shell game. It’s a loophole that nobody ever intended to create, and that should be done away with forthwith. Eliminating may be bad for some firms who currently enjoy the loophole, but it’s not going to hurt overall employment levels for Joe Crowley’s constituents or for anyone else’s.