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Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein is a staff reporter at The Washington Post. You can read his blogging here. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He's been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.

Recent Articles

THE OPPONENTS OF HEALTH CARE REFORM.

Ezra KleinMay 12, 2009

It's good to be lucky in your friends, but it's better to be lucky in your enemies. And as Rachel Maddow argues, Obama seems increasingly lucky in his enemies:

IS CAP AND TRADE ENOUGH? (NO.)

Ezra KleinMay 12, 2009

This gets a bit wonky, but Dave Roberts has a good post explaining why cap and trade -- or a carbon tax -- may not be enough to really move us over to renewable energy. Simply slapping a price on carbon might be a sufficient answer if the only failure in the market was that carbon sat lonely and unpriced. But it's not. Roberts explains.

COVERAGE OPTIONS.

Ezra KleinMay 11, 2009

I'm not sure why official Washington is insisting on releasing so much health care news today, but here's the Finance Committee's paper on policy options to expand coverage. This is, in theory, the guidebook that the Committee will use when building its bill. The whole thing is worth reading, but for those interested, the public plan options begin on the 13th page.

WHAT IS THIS "CAP AND TRADE" OF WHICH YOU SPEAK?

Ezra KleinMay 11, 2009

Via Dave Weigel and Matt Yglesias comes the depressing news that the vast majority of the public doesn't know what cap and trade" is. And I don't mean in the sense that they don't understand the auctions. They have no idea what problem the policy actually refers to. "Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues.

YOUR WORLD IN CHARTS: FINANCIAL INNOVATION EDITION.

Ezra KleinMay 11, 2009

The Peterson Institute's Adam S. Posen and Marc Hinterschweiger have a couple neat graphs making the case against financial innovation. They did not begin as skeptics. They liked the idea of financial innovation. They believed the promises "that expansion in the use of newer derivatives and the like would lead to an expansion in the country’s capital stock, and that these financial products would be useful to nonfinancial companies, not just to banks." But that didn't happen. Their first graph plots the growth of derivatives against the growth of capital stock. It basically shows a massive rise in fake money that's unconnected to any similar increase in real money.

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