I’m in London, with my friend and co-author Ross Douthat, to meet with right-of-center thinkers and activists and friends, and I’m hoping to share thoughts and impressions once I get back on Sunday.

For now, though, I’ll just say that I’m sympathetic to Tyler Cowen’s VAT remarks;

Greg Mankiw suggests killing the estate tax and capping the top individual and corporate tax rate at 25 percent in exchange for a VAT (shades of the Graetz plan, though Graetz is a fan of the estate tax);

Stephen Goldsmith has written an excellent column for e21 on swelling state budgets and what to do about them (a column that made me regret the fact that Goldsmith won’t make another run for statewide office in Indiana);

Ed Glaeser has offered a smart stimulus strategy that will never be adopted because it makes too much sense,

My own preferred intervention is the temporary reduction of taxes that hit younger and lower wage workers, like the payroll tax. Temporarily reducing the taxes for Social Security and Medicare, which are paid by both employers and employees, should increase both employment and earnings. This reduction could even be made budget-neutral if it was offered primarily to younger people in exchange for accepting delayed eligibility for these programs’ benefits.

Rebecca Smith has a terrific report in the Wall Street Journal on the brightening prospects for small nuclear reactors;

I want to write a much longer post on Sunil Khilnani’s call for an Indian social democracy.

And the worst possible news I’ve seen today is the news that the excise tax, one of relatively few good things to come out of the Obama administration’s health reform push, is not long for this world.