My column, “Give Thanks for Job Creators,” ran in today’s USA Today. The gist is that this Thanksgiving, we should be especially grateful to people who created jobs in 2009. And to be wary of politicians who want to collect (or even hike!) taxes in order to fund job creation schemes. Why not just leave the money with people who create jobs in the first place?

When First Lady Michelle Obama made the cover of some editions of Glamour magazine last week in a sleeveless red dress with a necklace as sparkly as her smile, it wasn’t for her undeniable good looks. She won the spot as part of the magazine’s annual Women of the Year awards, honoring the world’s female movers and shakers.

Katie Couric, who interviewed Obama for the December issue, notes that “I couldn’t imagine a list of 2009 Women of the Year that didn’t acknowledge America’s First Lady.” Editor-in-Chief Cindi Leive, on her blog, called Obama’s inclusion a “very, very, very easy choice to make.”

I’m not so sure it should have been.

Michelle Obama has broken barriers, but she still represents a rather old-fashioned notion that the female route to power is to marry it – one it’s puzzling that Glamour would promote.

Though filled with the usual clothes and sex tips, Glamour has done an admirable job of stretching the genre of women’s magazines, honoring, for instance, ambitious young women through its annual Top 10 College Women list. The magazine prides itself on its feminist sentiments, and endorsed Al Gore in 2000 out of worries that George W. Bush would limit abortion rights.

In that vein, the purpose of the Women of the Year project is to show Glamour’s young readers that they can do anything. They can speak up for justice (as the Iranian women honored this year have done). They can be Secretary of State (Condoleezza Rice in 2008), House Minority Leader and then Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi in 2002), executives at major companies (Marissa Mayer of Google this year), or even break the glass ceiling in that very male-dominated profession, comedy (Amy Poehler). Sure, some in-the-news celebrities (Rihanna) get put on the list to garner headlines, though these women have generally done something (e.g., top the charts) in their own right.

That’s what makes the First Lady a curious choice. With degrees from Princeton and Harvard, she could have run for office herself. She could have used her law degree to rise through the ranks of judges to land on the Supreme Court. She could have had a pioneering business career, perhaps becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. She could have started a company or a national non-profit.

She didn’t do any of that.

Instead, though she’s held many prestigious (and well-paying) jobs, overall, she kept her personal ambitions relatively limited in order to spend time with her girls and run the home front while her husband advanced his career, first in the Illinois state senate, later as a U.S. Senator, and of course, during his epic campaign for the presidency.

There’s reason to believe she wasn’t thrilled with the sacrifices this required (The Audacity of Hope recounts her complaints) but she did it, nonetheless, and there is nothing wrong with putting your husband’s career first. It’s a choice many women make. It certainly paid off for her, as evidenced by the Obamas’ multimillion dollar net worth and the platform she now has to promote the causes she cares about.

But because of her choices, the First Lady is on the national public stage mainly because she is the wife of a famous man. Unlike, say, Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin, who built their own power bases and public careers, the only reason you’ve heard of the brilliant Michelle Obama is that she married a man named Barack.

Is this the message Glamour wants to send to its readers? The fact that Barack, not Michelle, holds the office of president belies Couric’s statement in Glamour that Mrs. Obama is “a powerful symbol of our nation’s progress.”

In a year in which five women won Nobel Prizes alongside the First Lady’s husband, Glamour could have done better.

My review of Lee Eisenberg’s Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer will Keep On Buying No Matter What ran in the Wall Street Journal today.

My column on green and frugal seniors, Grandma’s Greener Than You, ran in USA Today this morning.

I have been in a light posting mode of late, thanks to my newest addition, Sam. He was born September 24, was probably close to 9lbs at birth (his discharge weight was 8lbs 8oz) and he has continued to expand from there. So far he has been a pretty good baby, and his older brother Jasper is definitely warming up to him.

Sam checks out the world in his styling fall fashion hoodie

So it came out yesterday that Conde Nast, after a thorough review by McKinsey, will be shuttering a number of titles. As a magazine junkie, I’m still sore about the closing of Domino earlier this year. But I’m really steamed about the axe falling on Cookie, Conde Nast’s parenting title. Indeed, I’ve had to talk myself down from throwing the kind of temper tantrum that my 2-year-old pitches when you take away his toy cars.

This is not to say that Cookie was perfect. Like many titles, I almost always managed to get through it in an hour. I don’t view that as a positive in a magazine designed to give you something to…read.

But the concept was different and intriguing. This was going to be a “stylish” magazine for the “new mom.” More educated and with more disposable income than moms of a generation ago, she had a certain aesthetic sensibility. She owned the Bugaboo stroller, the Bloom high chair, and she had a thing for plain wooden toys or — if they must be branded — Melissa and Doug. She had a certain nostalgia for old-fashioned family activities like apple picking, but she was also up for the adventure of bringing her family to Austria where she did not want to stay in chain hotels. She liked the idea of cooking dinner — foodie dinners at that — though she had to face the reality of limited time. After all, as part of being in a higher-income household, she most likely had a job. Not just a job. A profession. And so, it was taken for granted that she had interests beyond how often her children were pooping. If she wanted parenting tips, she wanted them in the form of essays written in prose that more closely resembled the New Yorkers’ than the short how-tos in most parenting magazines. She wanted essays that acknowledged that men existed and often shared in the care of children.

In other words, this was a magazine so perfectly targeted at yours truly that I tended to read it first from my pile of glossies. Indeed, I liked the concept so much that I was personally offended when Cookie ran a cartoon insulting Sarah Palin (I sent a note reminding the editors that their core readership of married moms tended to vote Republican). As I said, the execution was not perfect. I wanted longer essays, longer stories that touched on parenting but recognized that parents are people, too. But Cookie at least came closer to that than the primary-color splattered pages of other parenting magazines. Like those snapshots of nostalgic moments of toddlers asleep or chasing fireflies Cookie tended to run on the back page, this magazine will be missed.

A new Gallup poll shows that Americans, when asked to estimate government waste, give a mean answer of 50 cents for every dollar. This is up 25 percent from 1970, when Americans thought the federal government wasted a “mere” 40 cents of every dollar. If you think about it, this answer suggests a profound cynicism about Washington DC. It’s also an expensive cynicism (Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, calculates that this means we believe the US government is wasting a solid $2 trillion annually).

Obviously, the main way the federal government raises this money is through taxes. So, given that the average American believes Uncle Sam is wasting half the money we send in, why has lower taxes not been a winning issue for Republicans of late?

The first reason, it seems to me, is that Republicans aren’t pushing this message particularly hard. Plenty of Republican politicians get plenty of benefit from this waste (see the Alaskan Bridge to Nowhere phenomenon), and plenty others prefer to beat the drums of God, military, apple pie, morals, senior citizen death panels, etc. These aren’t really fiscal issues, per se.

Second, an increasingly high proportion of Americans do not pay much in taxes, personally. Indeed, the increased use of refundable tax credits has made the tax burden for many middle income families fairly small. These families include the Joe Six Pack types that Republicans are now trying to court. While we fully know that government wastes money, as long as it’s someone else’s money, that’s not so big a problem, especially if you believe the “someone else” is some moneyed fat cat spending $1.2 million to upgrade his Wall Street office as his bank is failing. The fact that it’s just as likely to be a small business owner who has personally created six jobs (and is trying to maintain that payroll in a tough economy) doesn’t really get the headlines.

But it should. I have been thinking, of late, that there really needs to be a political party billing itself as the party of job creators. What this recession is revealing is that for all the complaints about overwork, Americans are happiest when they are gainfully employed. Most jobs are created by small businesses. These small businesses and their employees (and the growing population of free agents) could be a political force.

And so, I’ve been fascinated to see a new group calling itself the Free Enterprise Nation taking out ads in major media outlets this week pointing out that various governments are taxing the private sector to provide benefits and salaries for public employees that the private sector can’t afford. Between wages and benefits, the organization claims, the average public sector worker got $119,982 in 2008, compared with the average private sector worker’s salary and benefits take of $59,909.

I’m not entirely sure who is behind these ads — if it’s an “Astroturf” movement or what — but it got my attention. We shall see if anything comes of it.

Jonathan Last has an interesting essay on the Taste Page of the Wall Street Journal this morning about the economics of the Duggar family, stars of 18 Kids and Counting. According to the essay, it may soon by 19 kids and counting.

Raising lots of children is privately expensive but publicly beneficial, Last claims, in that they help prop up our Social Security system. I made a similar point in my USA Today op-ed last spring, “Bring on the Baby Boom.”

But attempts to figure out exactly what it costs to raise children are always difficult. For instance, Last writes that “The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies reports that in 2008 the average cost of a full-time nanny was $9,630.”

This is fascinating, because the federal minimum wage is currently $7.25/hour. It was slightly lower in 2008, but still. In New York, payroll taxes come out to about 12% of payroll. So to employ someone legally as a nanny would cost at least $8.12 an hour. For 35 hours, the minimum definition of full-time, this comes out to more than $14,000 a year. And most people who have full-time nannies do so because they work full-time, meaning they need someone for a few more hours than that. A full year of 40 hour weeks comes out to over $16,000.

Leave aside the issue of tax evasion (which is widespread, as I found out while hiring a nanny– legally– recently). What’s most surprising to hear is that the average nanny is working for less than the federal minimum wage! This is not part of the Duggars’ economics, but something is not computing here.

My recent USA Today op-ed, The Princess Problem, is featured in the daily email from DailyWorth.com.

Interestingly, Amanda Steinberg, the site’s head, also recorded her time use on a recent day, pointing out how she works 45 or so hours per week (running two businesses), sleeps eight hours a night, and has lots of time to hang out with her two small children. Some similar themes from 168 Hours!

I’m looking for a few people willing to read 168 Hours (the book) and provide some constructive feedback. Please shoot me a message if you are interested. Thanks!