The president's "Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction" mainly hinges on persuading Congress to trade $447 billion in temporary payroll tax cuts and spending increases — the "jobs plan" — for permanent income-tax increases of $150 billion a year. Mr. Obama also calls on the 12-member congressional super committee to undertake "comprehensive tax reform," which he defines in peculiar fashion as trading lower deductions for higher rates.According to the Sept. 19 White House fact sheet, "The President calls on [the super committee] to undertake comprehensive tax reform, and lays out five principles for it to follow: 1) lower tax rates; 2) cut wasteful loopholes and tax breaks; 3) reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion; 4) boost job creation and growth; and 5) comport with the "Buffett Rule" that people making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay."

Pundits are accustomed to utilizing the language of war and strife to depict economic relationships. This is confusing, irrational and misleading. For the dismal science addresses mutual benefit, or positive-sum games. All participants gain whenever a trade, a purchase, sale, rental agreement, job, etc., gets consummated; necessarily so in the ex ante sense, and in the overwhelming majority of cases ex post.For example, if I purchase a newspaper for $1, it is an apodictic undeniable truth that at that moment, I ranked the periodical more highly than the money I had to pay for it. Why else, for goodness sakes, would I have been willing to engage in this commercial transaction was this not so? I anticipated that I would benefit from this trade. Even in the ex post sense, from the vantage points of afterward, in virtually all such cases I and everyone else in this position gains. Rare is the case where I, or anyone else for that matter, regrets the purchase of a paper on the ground that there was no good news in it after all, and that was what the buyer was seeking and expecting.

 While waiting at the Miami airport for my flight to Brazil one day last week, I read a press report that Brazil’s tourism minister was illegally using a government driver as his wife’s private chauffeur. By the time I arrived in Brasilia seven hours later, the minister had already been sacked.What a difference with what is happening in many other Latin American countries, and with what was happening in Brazil until recently.It was the fifth time that President Dilma Rousseff had fired a minister since she took office in January. Most of them were laid off following media investigations into alleged wrongdoings. We’re not talking of multi-million dollar deposits of government funds into private offshore accounts, like the ones that are periodically reported by independent media in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, but with little or no legal consequences. In Brazil, Rousseff seems to have little patience with even the appearance of government corruption.

Buffett said Monday in a New York Times opinion piece that he would immediately raise tax rates on households with taxable income of more than $1 million, and he would add an additional increase for those making $10 million or more.He also recommends that the 12 members of Congress charged with devising a deficit-cutting plan leave rates for 99.7% of taxpayers unchanged."My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress," Buffett wrote. "It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."

Google made a $12.5 billion bet on Monday that its future — and the future of big Internet companies — lies in mobile computing, and moved aggressively to take on its arch rival Apple in the mobile market.The Silicon Valley giant, known for its search engine and Android phone software, rattled the tech world with its announcement that it would acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, allowing it to get into the business of making cellphones and tablets.The acquisition, Google’s largest to date and an all-cash deal, would put the company in head-to-head competition with its own business partners, the many phone makers that use Android software, as well as with Apple.The deal, which requires regulatory approval, would also give Google a valuable war chest of more than 17,000 patents that would help it defend Android from a barrage of patent lawsuits.“Computing is moving onto mobile,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said in an interview. “Even if I have a computer next to me, I’ll still be on my mobile device.”