Here are a few highlights from Cato Today, a daily email from the Cato Institute. You can subscribe here.

• Scott Lincicome discusses how the Obama administration has put U.S. leadership in free trade in jeopardy.

• Ted Galen Carpenter discusses President Obama’s recent trip to Mexico to meet with President Felipe Calderon.

• Appearing on PBS, Cato Chairman Robert A. Levy debates the state of American gun laws.

• Watch Juan Carlos Hidalgo discuss Obama’s trip to Mexico on BBC World.

• In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, John Samples discusses what the “Tea Party” protests mean for the GOP.

After Salon writer Glenn Greenwald spoke at a Cato forum about his new study on Portugal’s successful drug decriminalization program, he sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to discuss his research.

Here’s the video:

A May 1st Federalist Society lunch will feature William Kristol, Editor of the Weekly Standard speaking on “The Obama Administration and the War on Terror.” Hopefully, it will be a fair-minded inquiry into the utility of the “war” metaphor for combating and suppressing terrorism.

I’ve read conflicting reports on how focused last week’s tea parties were on the anti-tax and spend message. It does appear there were confused folks who thought the protests were platforms for nationalism, war, and partisan anti-Obama rants. But I’m not buying the completely dismissive tone taken by some pundits who viewed the events as simply being pro-GOP rallies fueled by Fox News.

A boisterous crowd in Greenville, SC saw right through Republican Congressman Gresham Barrett’s transparent attempt to curry their favor heading into his 2010 campaign for governor of the Palmetto State:

Frankly, I can’t believe the guy made it through the five minute speech given the level of heckling and booing. Regardless of what one thinks of the crowd’s behavior, they deserve credit for knowing that Congressman Barrett voted for the TARP bailout and thus had no business faking solidarity with them, let alone speaking at the event.

The California Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation is holding hearings today on bill AB 279, the “Great Schools Tax Credit Act.” This bill is much like the scholarship donation tax credit program in Florida, which is a bi-partisan success that saves the state $1.49 for every $1 it reduces state revenue.

But you wouldn’t know that if you read the Committee’s remarkably flawed official Bill Analysis.

Among other things, the Bill Analysis glaringly misrepresents Adam Schaeffer’s “Public Education Tax Credit” paper, incorrectly calls tax credited donations public funds, omits crucial findings from other states that favor credits, and engages in unsubstantiated speculation.

To address its failings, I penned the following letter which is being distributed to the committee today.

Dear California state legislators,

The official Bill Analysis of AB 279 suffers errors of fact and omission, misrepresents the findings of a paper published by my organization, and will mislead legislators unless these problems are corrected. To address these problems, I respectfully submit this letter.

The Bill Analysis characterizes a 2007 Cato Institute paper as arguing that “vouchers and tax credits deliver similar results” (page 7–8 of the Analysis). This is false. The paper in fact argues that:

Vouchers and tax credits are, however, very different mechanisms for delivering school choice and it is those differences that will be analyzed below. The analysis reveals that tax credits are inherently preferable to vouchers across at least five dimensions.

The above text appears on the same page as one cited in the Bill Analysis, so the author of that Analysis can reasonably be expected to have noticed the boldface section title on that page of the Cato Institute paper: “Why Tax Credits Are Preferable to Vouchers.” The dimensions on which tax credits are found to be preferable include program outcomes such as maximizing the diversity of educational options among which parents are able to choose, maximizing parental and community involvement in education, and creating incentives for long term program efficiency. This directly contradicts the characterization of our paper by the Bill Analysis.

The Bill Analysis goes on to claim that AB 279 appears to be “patterned after the Public Education Tax Credit Act model legislation developed by the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Reform.” I would be pleased to claim credit for this if it were true, but since the PETC model legislation combines a scholarship donation credit (such as AB 279’s) with a direct credit for parents to use against their own children’s education, it does not appear that AB 279 was based on our model. It is worth noting that our organization’s name is the Center for Educational Freedom, not the Center for Educational Reform as it is referred to in the Bill Analysis.

Among the more surprising omissions in the Bill Analysis is that it fails to mention the only official government fiscal impact assessment of a scholarship tax credit program: a study released last December by Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis & Government Accountability. The OPPAGA study finds that Florida’s program, which is similar to AB 279, saves the state $1.49 for every dollar it reduces state revenue. This 49% annual return on investment represents a staggering windfall for the state treasury at a time when budgets are extremely tight. Not surprisingly, Florida’s legislature is currently considering legislation to expand the base of taxes to which the credits can be applied, to maximize the number of families who can benefit, and hence the state’s savings. This follows the Florida legislature’s increase of the program funding cap by 50% last year, with the support of one third of the state’s Democratic caucus, half of its black caucus, and its entire Hispanic caucus. The program is a bi-partisan success.

The AB 279 Bill Analysis is also confused in its assessment of the legal issues. It asserts that AB 279 “encourages the use of public funds for religious activities and education.” This claim is mistaken, and the Analysis unsurprisingly presents to no evidence to support it. Several court cases in Arizona and Illinois have addressed the question of whether non-refundable education tax credits represent the spending of government money, and all have found that they do not. The money donated to scholarship organizations never enters the state’s coffers, and so is not public money. The supreme court of Arizona, for example, has upheld that state’s scholarship donation tax credit program for specifically this reason, while recently striking down two voucher programs because they do use public funds in contravention of a state constitutional prohibition similar to that in California.

Finally, the Analysis is filled with unsubstantiated speculation about what might happen under scholarship donation tax credit programs, but presents little evidence from the most similar programs — those operating in Florida and Pennsylvania — on what is actually happening. Legislators would be wise to request testimony from people familiar with the actual operation of those programs and from families participating in them. Children’s futures are at stake.

In today’s Washington Post, Chris Cillizza predicts that Mitt Romney “will move to seize the high ground (from a policy perspective) on health care over the coming months and is likely to be Obama’s leading critic when Congress takes up the legislation in the fall.” For anyone who thinks this is good news, I refer you to my post from last week regarding the many failures of Governor Romney’s last foray into health care reform.

At first, I thought the calendar was wrong and it must be April 1 and the White House was playing an April Fool’s joke. That seemed like the only logical explanation for a story in today’s Washington Post stating that the President wants all government departments to identify $100 million in supposed budget cuts. With 14 cabinet-level departments, that adds up to $1.4 billion of savings — and those savings almost certainly be measured against an ever-increasing budget baseline, which means that they would merely be reductions in planned increases. This is a shallow and insincere stunt to trick taxpayers. This is the same President, after all, that just squandered nearly $800 billion on a so-called stimulus bill. And this is the same President that just rammed through a $3.5 trillion budget. This chart provides a useful comparison.

For those who appreciate irony (or perhaps a late April Fool’s joke), the Washington Post story makes for interesting reading:

President Obama plans to convene his Cabinet for the first time today, where he will order members to identify a combined $100 million in budget cuts over the next 90 days, according to a senior administration official. Although the cuts would account to a minuscule portion of the federal budget, they are intended to signal the president’s determination to trim spending and reform government, the official said. …In his radio and Internet address Saturday, Obama repeated his vow for his administration to scour the federal budget “line by line” to reduce spending.

Update: Some people have written to say that Obama is asking his team to come up with a combined $100 million, not $100 million from each department. So my initial post gave him 14 times too much credit. This is almost beyond parody.