Passing the Buck

Obama shouldn't pass the buck as much as he does, but both sides do it:

Dear Fellow State Employee:
I want to personally thank you again for your hard work effort serving the
people of the Commonwealth, especially over the course of my 7 weeks in office.
... [O]ver the last several years before I became Governor the state work force
experienced a reduction of 1,651 positions, with an additional 664 recommended
layoffs in the new biennial budget introduced by Governor Kaine. When I took
office, I was faced with a $2.1 billion budget deficit. ...
Sincerely,
Robert F. McDonnell
Governor

That was a form letter sent to all state employees. I don't blame him for not mentioning the public primary and secondary schools that will be closing in rural Virginia, or spending millions to re-open several seldom-used highway reststops statewide. But the bigger point here is that I don't expect to hear John Boehner or Mitch McConnell to call him out for passing the buck to his predecessor (a democrat, incidentally). And, if you think I'm being harsh, I left out the part where he blamed bad snowstorms (oops, coulen't resist).

Some Links, Featuring Academic Wages and Pro-Immigration Seniors

Academic Wage Stickiness (short summary here; long version here)
New Index of Financial Conditions (I would prefer a factor analysis approach to a components analysis approach, so we could isolate underlying dimensions of financial conditions, but it's a start)
Property Rights for Indian Emigrants
Remittances to Tajikistan during the Downturn
Old People should Love Immigrants (but my guess is that they don't, for non-economic reasons)
How (and When) Best to to Cut Deficits?
A Couple of Dead, Liberarian Economists in Support of ARRA (the Bastiat excerpt here, courtesy of the right-leaning, Austrian-school-supporting, libertarian Library of Economics and Liberty)
Carbon Emission Policy