ERIC HOLDER UPDATE: Gunwalker Anger Goes Bipartisan: Joe Lieberman Joins Chorus.

CHANGE: Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That’s bad news not just for the country’s economy but for the future of innovation.

GOVERNORS JOURNAL NAMES SCOTT WALKER GOVERNOR OF THE YEAR. Andrew Cuomo is runner up.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why We Stopped Spanking.

I wonder, however, if “better” is quite the right word. It seems to me that what parents have discovered is a much, much more intensive form of parenting than their grandparents employed. The elaborate charts and systems of incentives are enabled by the fact that modern children are effectively monitored by adults every waking hour until they become quite old.

As Valerie Ramey points out in a recent essay, one of the enduring mysteries of the 20th century is that in America, at least, labor saving appliances don’t seem to have saved much labor. Adults spend less time on certain “home production” tasks–like cooking–but more on others, particularly childcare. . . . Today’s kids seem to be not only supervised but regimented; most of their time is supposed to be spent in some sort of structured activity. This makes it very easy to create elaborate reward systems, because there is all this elaborate surveillance that makes it very easy to monitor compliance.

I had some related thoughts here. “We keep hearing about declining birthrates, but raising a kid is far more expensive — financially, emotionally, and in terms of time — today than it was a few decades ago. As she occasionally notes, things that were considered adequate, or even exemplary, parenting then are now considered abuse or neglect. In fact, when you look at how the burden of childrearing has increased, it seems amazing that we see as many people having children as we do.” By way of comparison, I invoked James Lileks.

But here’s another thought. Why are kids today so fat? Because — since you can’t (or at least, many parents don’t) induce good behavior by spanking, people try to keep kids happy with food. (That’s the most common “reward.”) Stick a kid in a carseat — unknown in the past — and you pacify them with a juicebox or some goldfish. They’re immobile (burning fewer calories than old-fashioned front-to-back clambering kids) and fed to distract them from the unhappiness of being strapped in like a mummy.

Likewise, schools and daycare centers shove snacks at them for the same reason. It may only add up to a few hundred calories a day in the form of extra snacks and reduced mobility, but that’s all it takes to produce weight gain over time.

The Bryan Caplan “good enough” approach is healthier, and easier on parents. Related item here. Beware the wimpy parents.

And maybe spanking isn’t so bad.

UPDATE: Here’s a column I wrote a while back on related matters. Excerpt:

Meanwhile, in the United States, commentator John Gibson is calling for “procreation, not recreation.” But I think that attitude is part of the problem. (Procreation not recreation? As an old-timer once reportedly said in response to the Make Love, Not War, slogan: “Hell, in my time we did both.”)

But Gibson’s slogan unwittingly captures an important aspect of the problem, in the United States and other industrial societies, at least: We’ve taken a lot of the fun out of parenting. Or to echo Longman, the “social costs” of parenting continue to rise, and, more significantly, perhaps, the “social returns” continue to decline.

Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting “experts” and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what’s amazing isn’t that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all. . . . There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society. If it were, childless people would drive minivans just to partake of the aura.

In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.

So as we head into what looks like a major demographic debate, I think we need to look beyond subsidies and finances to culture. If people want to see Americans have more children, they should probably ignore Putin’s advice, and they should definitely ignore Gibson’s advice. They should look at ways of making parenting more rewarding, and less burdensome, in social as well as economic terms.

Read the whole thing, if I do say so myself. Plus, here’s a law-review article on how the legal system encourages “over-parenting.”

NEWS FROM THE BIRTHPLACE OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance.

HMM: Hubble Spots Complex Carbon Compounds, Possibly Organic, on Pluto’s Surface. “Organic” doesn’t mean there’s life, of course, but it’s interesting.

REAL ESTATE: Fewer Than 500 New Homes Sold In Over $750,000 Bracket For 4th Month In A Row. Wow. “One thing becomes apparent when looking at the price range breakdown in the just released latest New Home Sales breakdown – the quality, or rather price, of homes sold continues to deteriorate.” I’ll say.

UPDATE: Reader Gregory Hill writes: “Doesn’t this demonstrate, yet again, that the rich are not getting richer during this downturn? Wouldn’t we be seeing significantly higher numbers than this if the OWS protesters were right? Maybe I’m missing something here, but this seems like a pretty damning statistic.”

LOOK FOR THE UNION LABEL: Two UAW officials sentenced to prison for strike-related extortion.

Related: This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies.

JOEL KOTKIN: The Sun Belt’s Migration Comeback.

Along with the oft-pronounced, desperately wished for death of the suburbs, no demographic narrative thrills the mainstream news media more than the decline of the Sun Belt, the country’s southern rim extending from the Carolinas to California. Since the housing bubble collapse in 2007, commentators have heralded “the end of the Sun Belt boom.”

Yet this assertion is largely exaggerated, particularly since the big brass buckle in the middle of the Sun Belt, Texas, has thrived throughout the recession. California, of course, has done far worse, but its slow population growth and harsh regulatory environment align it more with the Northeast than with its sunny neighbors.

Moreover, the Sun Belt is poised for a recovery, according to the most recent economic and demographic data.

Read the whole thing.

SPECULATION: So the White House usually does a late-Friday document dump, releasing stuff that would make them look bad at the very lowest point in the news cycle. Tonight, the Friday before Christmas Eve, will be the lowest point of the year. Will they take advantage of that to release something really bad?

HOPE AND CHANGE: Merry Christmas America, Now Give Us Your Money – Love, EPA.

TODAY ONLY: TCL 40-Inch 1080p 60 Hz LCD HDTV with 2-Year Warranty, $259.99.

And it’s too late for delivery by Christmas, but Amazon is still running holiday “lightning deals” all day.

UPDATE: The TVs sold out. Sorry — you snooze, you lose on these deals.

ELEVEN IN TWO: I talk about the Higher Education Bubble on PJTV. Part of a series of two-minute pieces on the big stories of 2011.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): The American Dream Packs Its Bags. “For some, the prospect of old age relocation is exciting and optional; for others it may be necessary. Public pension funds and union schemes, from the state level to USPS, have been grossly over promised, under invested, and the rate of return badly overestimated. A combination of cheap airfares, high unemployment and crimped retirement savings will induce many to consider following the American dream beyond our shores. Moving away also keeps pesky college grads from prolonged squatting at mom and dad’s. Skype and email can keep you in touch.”

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The EPA’s Mercury Madness. “The EPA thinks it’s worth spending billions of dollars each year to reduce already minuscule amounts of mercury in the outside air. So why is it trying to shove mercury-laced fluorescent bulbs into everyone’s homes?”

SHOCKING NEWS: Neil Munro: White House Using Fake Numbers In Payroll Tax Fight.

POLITICS: Bush Hatred Prevails Over Obama Love. “The legacy of the Left’s extreme Bush hatred, which led them to caricature Bush and scorn and misrepresent the great majority of his policies, policies they otherwise might have found reasonable, has had profound consequences for Obama. First, when he takes the same course of action that Bush took, however pragmatic it might be, he looks like a sellout to his most ardent supporters and he looks spineless or unprincipled to moderates. They begin to ask: What does Obama really stand for? Thus, second, Obama lost, quite early in his administration, a President’s most precious commodity: the trust of the American people. They no longer knew whether he said what he meant and meant what he said. And third, this puts him in a tough position entering the election contest. Obama can deliver the same soaring speeches, but soaring speeches swiftly turn sour when the speaker’s actions contradict his words.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN . . . OH, HELL, YOU KNOW THE REST: DOJ to America: we won’t reveal the circumstances under which you can be assassinated by us.

MAX BOOT: “Mission (Not) Accomplished” in Iraq. “If there is one thing we have learned about Iraq during the last decade, it is that violence is a direct reflection of the political process or lack thereof. When politics was dysfunctional in 2003-2007, violence skyrocketed. Once the success of the surge kicked in, the political process began to function again and various factions could resolve their disputes with back-room deals rather than with bombs and rockets. Now that U.S. troops have pulled out, the political process is fraying once again. Consider the events of just the past few days.”

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Duncan Law School Sues ABA Over Denial of Accreditation.

MARKETS: GoDaddy supports SOPA, customers take business elsewhere. “Following GoDaddy’s announcement backing the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, many customers have started to move their domains to other hosts. I guess that throwing your customers to the wolves isn’t a good business tactic.”

PAYROLL TAX MESS: “The Democrats have undermined their own arguments about the true nature of the Social Security program (turns out it really is a tax-based welfare program, not a dedicated, contribution-based retirement program), and that the Republicans either ought to take them up on it, or flip the thing one more time and pose as the principled champions of Keeping Social Security Solvent.”

ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION: For Bloggers at Risk: Creating a Contingency Plan. How to deal with government intimidation and suppression.

SITEMETERENFREUDE? Hey, my traffic isn’t down.