If you knew -- "a few weeks ago, the federal government had to commit several hundred billion dollars for a guarantee of Citicorp's assets, though examiners from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) have been inside the bank full-time for years, supervising the operations of this giant institution, under the broad powers granted by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 to bank supervisors" -- what would you think about the effectiveness of U.S. bank regulation?

The above quote comes from a thoughtful and important new paper, Regulation without Reason, by Peter J. Wallison, former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury and now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mr. Wallison warned for years - in books and articles - that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were headed for disaster, and now he is taking on the ill-thought out proposals to increase regulation of the financial industry, both by politicians and people who should know better.

The frightening thing is that many of the same intellectually and financially corrupt politicians - e.g. Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd - whose actions directly helped bring on the present crisis, have now been put in charge of the hen house and are tasked with "making reforms."

We're failing in Afghanistan. Confirmed as our new commander there, Gen. David Petraeus has the unenviable task of producing something President Obama can call a success.

If Petraeus can salvage the situation so that our minimum needs are met, he'll confirm his reputation as the greatest American soldier of our time. Should he falter, he'll go down as the general who sold the Pentagon a disastrous doctrine.

Petraeus did not want this job. But our president didn't know to whom else to turn in the wake of last week's debacle with Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Petraeus did his duty, saluted and said, "Yes, sir."

Politically, Obama couldn't have made a shrewder choice. Petraeus enjoys cult status on both the right and the moderate left. The question is whether he's the right man militarily.

Can this marriage be saved?

How many husbands have been blindsided with the most horrifying words in the English language for them - "I want a divorce!"?  It happens to wives too, but most often it's the guys who are clueless until the damage is irreparable.

Ask any marriage counselor, and they'll confirm that, try as they may with all their skill, once a certain tipping point of anger, contempt, and distrust has been attained by one spouse, there is little the other spouse can do to salvage the relationship.  It has to be sundered.

That tipping point may have been reached this week.  After being reminded of some pedophile cruising down the street asking schoolchildren, "Hi kids, want some candy?", the American people may be on the verge of demanding a divorce from the man they politically married last November.

If you knew economic growth and new job creation begin to slow when total government spending is larger than about 25 percent of the economy, and you knew total government spending in the United States is about 36 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) - would you propose policies to make government larger or smaller to create more jobs and boost economic growth?

Over the last few decades, many economists have done studies on the "optimum" size of government. A new study just completed shows the optimum size of government is less than 25 percent of GDP. Optimum is defined as that point just before government becomes so large as to reduce the rate of economic growth and job creation.

Rather than increasing the size of government, the empirical evidence shows that sharply reducing taxes, regulations, and government spending down to at least 25 percent of GDP would do the most to spur economic growth and create more jobs over the long run.

There is virtually no empirical evidence - in the United States or anywhere else - to support the belief of economists of the Keynesian school that a big increase in government spending will make matters better, rather than worse. 

Last Friday (6/19), Kyrgyzstan's interim president, Roza Otunbayeva, flew to the site of this month's ethnic violence -- and raised the estimate of the dead to 2,000.

Some 400,000 ethnic Uzbeks have become refugees, with 100,000 safely across the border in Uzbekistan and 300,000 trapped in Kyrgyzstan. Their homes have been burned, their relatives beaten, raped or slaughtered.

The Kyrgyz military and police stood by and let it happen -- or pitched in. The interim government couldn't control them, once the ethnic cleansing began.

And it matters to us. Remote Kyrgyzstan has permitted our forces to use Manas air base to shuttle troops and supplies into Afghanistan. The base is vital, but our continued presence was already iffy. Now the Yankees may be told to go home.

This latest bout of butchery also matters because it fits in with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's strategy of re-establishing Russian hegemony over Central Asia. That's why he denied a Kyrgyz request for Russian peacekeepers.  That's why he's screwing Obama in Central Asia.

You work hard, take care of your family, and pay all the taxes the government says you owe as is typical of honest, upright citizens.

But what happens to your tax money? It is now going to "bail out" firms that pay their senior executives millions of dollars a year. Congress also intends to spend your tax dollars on an $825 billion "stimulus program" filled with many dubious projects and plain old-fashioned "pork."

Many good economists who have looked at the details of the stimulus package believe it has much more "de-stimulus" than stimulus in it and will make the American economy worse off rather than better off.

While you may have thought you are required by law to pay taxes on all your income, you learn the "important" folks in Washington seem to think paying taxes is optional - for them.

Hats off to Senator Jeff Sessions! The top Republican on the Senate's Judiciary Committee has opened up an important new front in the debate over Solicitor General Elena Kagan's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court: Her attitude towards the repressive legal code authoritative Islam calls Shariah and her enabling of efforts to insinuate it into this country.

By so doing, the Alabama legislator has given his colleagues and the country an opportunity not only to flesh out and evaluate the thin public record of President Obama's second nominee to a lifetime appointment on the nation's highest court. The Senator has also afforded us all what Mr. Obama might call a "teachable moment."

Specifically, this Supreme Court nomination offers a prism for examining the concerted and ominous campaign underway to bring Shariah to America, thanks to the troubling role Ms. Kagan played during her tenure as dean of Harvard's Law School.

April 1, 2013.  Unemployment is approaching 25 percent, inflation is close to 40 percent, major portions of the U.S. are having power "brownouts," and Americans are forced to go to foreign countries for timely and quality medical care.

How did the world's largest and most prosperous economy fall into such a morass in only a very few years?

Collapse of the American economy in 2013 began with several major policy mistakes by the Fed, the "Bush 43" administration, and Congress in the years from 2004-08, which were compounded with even greater policy mistakes by the Obama administration, Congress and the Fed from 2009 thereafter.

After promises of "change," the new Obama administration, the Democrat Congress and the Fed only made changes for the worse.

Afghanistan just got its worst news since the Soviet invasion three decades ago: American geologists have charted as much as a trillion dollars' worth of mineral deposits in that tormented landscape.

Up to now, Afghanistan's internal factions and neighbors have been fighting over worthless dirt, Allah and opium. Assigning the battlefield a trillion-dollar value is not a prescription for reconciliation. Expect "The Beverly Hillbillies" scripted by Satan.

Even were Afghanistan at peace, its endemic corruption would generate a grabocracy -- a Nigeria, not a Norway. Throw in inherited hatreds and the appetites of its neighbors, and Afghanistan may end up more like eastern Congo, a playground for state-sanctioned murderers and looters.

Beyond reportedly vast deposits of rare minerals (lithium, etc.) essential to popular technologies, there's copper, cobalt, iron and gold in them thar hills. Afghanistan never before offered so much to fight over.

Afghanistan's one hope was that, eventually, outsiders would leave it alone. That hope's gone now. Development of a full-blown mining industry will take decades, but that just means decades of violent competition.