The Ticker Quick Views on Politics, Economics and Finance

Paris and Rome may be famous for romance, but it’s Filipinos who get the most love. That, at least, is a conclusion that can be drawn from a global love survey conducted by the Gallup Organization.

In our latest column for Bloomberg View, we mine the unique Gallup data for insights into the nature of love and its relationship to nationality, age, money and economic development. The survey, conducted in 136 countries, posed the question: “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?”

President Barack Obama made an interesting change to the criteria for victory in Afghanistan during his State of the Union speech -- namely that al Qaeda has been "degraded."

It's easy to see why: No U.S. president likes to withdraw troops from a 10-year war without declaring "mission accomplished." Still, there's something worrying in this claim about al Qaeda.

It's not a big secret that the White House views wealthier Americans as part of any budget deficit solution. Yet today's Senate confirmation hearing for Treasury nominee Jack Lew suggests the extent to which the Obama administration views rich taxpayers as the primary solution.

The big take away from the Lew hearing was that the White House sees tax reform as a top priority -- and that any tax change be done in a way that raises revenue.

To gauge how Democrats and Republicans perceive their relative strengths in Washington today, the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama and the response by Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida are useful guides.

Obama, who spent his first term hemmed in by constraints -- fiscal crisis, skittish Democrats and then, starting in 2011, a Republican majority determined to destroy his presidency -- is still operating in a box. Republicans have a majority in the House and an operational veto over the Senate, where they have made 60 votes the threshold for passing legislation.

One of President Barack Obama’s biggest proposals in yesterday’s State of the Union Address was a big minimum wage increase, from $7.25 per hour to $9. The trade-off with any minimum wage increase is that it reduces inequality and poverty, but may raise unemployment. As Evan Soltas wrote for the Ticker last month, within the wage range that is on the table, the former effect should be substantial and the latter effect small, if existent. So, raising the minimum wage is a better idea than doing nothing.

But while a higher minimum wage is a way to address poverty, it’s not the best way. It would be preferable to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, a government program that makes payments to workers in low-income households. Unlike a higher minimum wage, a larger EITC would not create any disincentive to hire; and while some of the benefits of a minimum wage hike will go to teenagers in middle-class households, everyone who benefits from the EITC is poor.

This is a response to Margaret Carlson's column on Pope Benedict XVI.

The sexual crimes of so many Catholic priests; the malfeasance of bishops who “failed to deal justly and responsibly with allegations of abuse”; the tardiness and inadequacy and excuse-making of the official response when word of these horrors began to spread: The sex-abuse scandal is a wound that feels like it will never heal.

Time magazine says Senator Marco Rubio is going to save the Republican Party. It's wrong.

The response Rubio gave to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech offered little that was new or interesting. It consisted mostly of lines that could have come from any Republican politician, at any time in the last four years.

In the briefest of terms, in his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama promised to save as much money on Medicare in the next decade as was proposed by the Bowles-Simpson commission. That would include, he said, lowering tax subsidies for drug companies and asking more affluent beneficiaries to pay more. 

And he said it would also include making a fundamental change in the way the government pays for care -- by basing bills not on fee-for-service but on "the quality of care our seniors receive." This explains why John Kitzhaber, the governor of Oregon, was watching the State of the Union address from first lady Michelle Obama's box. Kitzhaber has made his state's Medicaid program a laboratory that will test a promising model for making that change.

President Barack Obama's State of the Union address posed its most interesting question in the first few moments: Can his administration break free of the challenges of recession? Or will it be weighed down for another four years?

"We have cleared away the rubble of crisis," the president said. Yet in the policy landscape he went on to describe, plenty of rubble remained. The Obama agenda, if this speech is any guide, continues to be defined by fiscal issues and deficit reduction. 

You could almost hear the sound of a collective breath being exhaled on the other side of the Atlantic tonight as President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. would open talks on a comprehensive trade agreement with the 27-nation European Union. 

Whether the president would commit to the arduous negotiations in his State of the Union address had been the subject of much speculation after EU officials took the first step last week and invited the U.S. to the table.  

Remarks of Republican Senator Marco Rubio -- As Prepared for Delivery 

Good evening. I'm Marco Rubio. I’m blessed to represent Florida in the United States Senate. Let me begin by congratulating President Obama on the start of his second term. Tonight, I have the honor of responding to his State of the Union address on behalf of my fellow Republicans.  And I am especially honored to be addressing our brave men and women serving in the armed forces and in diplomatic posts around the world. You may be thousands of miles away, but you are always in our prayers.

Remarks of U.S. President Barack Obama -- As Prepared for Delivery 

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, fellow citizens: 

Talk about just-in-time: If President Barack Obama focuses some of tonight's State of the Union address on income inequality and the opportunity gap (as the Bloomberg View editors urge), the issue's leading data-cruncher has new figures and analysis to buttress any initiatives.

Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, calculates that, during the 2007 to 2009 recession, average income per family declined dramatically by 17 percent, the largest two-year drop since the Great Depression. 

North Korea would like nothing more than for the U.S. and its allies to hyperventilate over the North's third test of a nuclear device. Indeed, with two satellite-cum-missile launches and one nuclear test during his first year in power, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has already displayed an appetite for foreign-policy brinksmanship that goes beyond the political need to show his people that he's large and in charge.

That said, there is good reason for the U.S. to remain calm and carry on, building a united front with the new governments in South Korea and Japan, trying to bring the Chinese along and then strengthening and refining sanctions through the United Nations.

Over the past few decades, states with no income tax have significantly outpaced states with the highest income taxes in population growth and therefore in economic growth. Conservatives like to point to this as an argument for cutting state income taxes.

But states in these groups have confounding similarities. For example, the highest income-tax states (a group dominated by California and New York) tend to have restrictive development policies and resultantly high housing costs; no-income-tax states (a group dominated by Florida and Texas) tend to have much easier development rules and lower home prices.

"We have a problem," former Representative Gabrielle Giffords says in a new television ad. In halting, elliptical speech, impaired by the brain damage she suffered when she was shot in the head two years ago, she explains: "Where we shop; where we pray; where our children go to school. But there are solutions we can agree on, even gun owners like us. Take it from me. Congress must act. Let's get this done."

Giffords is referring to the package of gun control legislation President Barack Obama proposed in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., last year. Her endorsement -- and her embodiment of both the exorbitant cost of gun violence and the courage it takes to overcome it -- is admirable. 

Kim Jong Un has a stark message for Barack Obama, Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping: I won't be ignored.

The North Korean leader clearly won the attention today of his counterparts in the U.S., Japan and China with the nation's third nuclear test. It was the first since Kim took over from his late father, who died in December 2011, and it adds another test to a world already awash in international flashpoints. Let's hope Obama, Abe and Xi get the memo.

This week Jim Kelly and Margaret Carlson are corresponding about Washington's moment on the small screen. Kelly is the former editor of Time magazine (and of Carlson) and is now a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist.

Margaret: I love House Speaker John Boehner: There, I’ve said it. My affection was born over the weekend as I watched "House of Cards" straight through to Episode 12. Only one episode left.

In his past three State of the Union addresses, President Barack Obama devoted less than 15 percent of his speech to the world beyond the U.S. So those speech paragraphs are pricey real estate. We asked some Bloomberg View columnists and regular contributors what foreign policy issues they thought the president should raise in the first State of the Union of his second term. Links to their suggestions are below:

Jonathan Alter on fighting terrorism morally. Clive Crook on expanding trade. Edward Glaeser on economic freedom. Jeffrey Goldberg on Israel and the Palestinians. Megan Greene on Europe and the economy. Albert R. Hunt on democracy promotion. Simon Johnson on the real Chinese economic threat. Tim Judah on cooperating with the EU. Pankaj Mishra on the “pivot to Asia.” Virginia Postrel on intellectual property. Amity Shlaes on U.S. leadership.

When four academics examined the Securities and Exchange Commission's revolving door seven months ago, they concluded that concerns about lax oversight were unfounded. If anything, they said, the prospect of future job opportunities for SEC lawyers resulted in more aggressive enforcement.

The Project on Government Oversight, a left-leaning Washington think tank, offers an alternative view. In a report out today, POGO devastatingly picks apart the earlier study. At the same time, POGO shows that the SEC's door isn't just revolving: It's spinning out of control.