Ezra Klein

Thought the first: They blew through $100 million? Buh-buh-buh-buh-how? The magazine wasn’t printed on gold leaf. It wasn’t staffed by robots from the future. It didn’t have a Mars bureau. My working assumption has been that the budget meetings went something like this: But presumably that’s not right. Or is it? Thought the second: Someone […]

Swine flu is obviously a bad thing. But it’s a bad thing with outrageously bad timing. Mexico, in particular, was in economic trouble before. The situation is dire now. The sort of policies you implement to quarantine a disease are the reverse of the sort of policies you implement to grow an economy. One requires […]

Fareed Zakaria interviews Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who turns out to be a total downer: Can we really prevent global warming? Or should we be thinking more about adaptation? Building coastal fortifications may be cheaper than halting the release of CO2. Right now, the climate scientists feel that if all humans shut off carbon emissions […]

This is all getting a little silly. From Dave Weigel’s article on the efforts of pro-life Kansans to derail Kathleen Sebelius’s nomination: According to [David Gittrich, the long-serving state development director of Kansans for Life.], when Brownback turns his sights on the governor’s race he’ll gave to “reestablish his credentials as a pro-lifer” and explain […]

I don’t mean to be churlish about this, because the intellectual history in Frank Foer and Noam Scheiber’s “Nudge-ocracy” is really quite good. But enough with the attempts to tie Obama to behavioral economics. The apparent influence of the nascent field on the actual policy proposals emerging from the administration is minimal. The stimulus was […]

Ben Smith has a nice catch today. Conservatives for Patient Rights — the folks founded and funded by this guy — released an ad quoting Canadian physician Brian Day on the horrors of socialized medicine. But an alert tipster sends the rest of the interview with Day. At about the four-minute mark, Days protests that […]

I’m loathe to describe Larry Summers’ in terms that suggest a shy and retiring personality, but it is the case that we’ve heard a lot less from him than from folks like, say, Tim Geithner. Last Friday, however, he gave a talk to the InterAmerican Development Bank outlining his take on the financial crisis (and […]

One other point worth making on the marriage debate. In general, this conversation is conducted at a fairly elite level. When we talk about young couples choosing between furthering their education and careers and getting married and having children, we’re generally talking about the minority of Americans who go to college or even travel beyond. […]

To say a bit more on Mark Regnerus’s brief for young marriage, these arguments have a tendency to sound like a debate Ward Cleaver thinks he’s having with Paris Hilton. That’s not as dismissive as it may sound: Cleaver and Hilton both have points. But they’re not terribly useful points. Regnerus gets at, but doesn’t […]

Ryan Lizza’s profile of Peter Orszag begins with a long Jon Stewart anecdote and ends by making some health care news. Thus, it is, in the eyes of this blog, virtually a perfect work. Here’s the news: Orszag’s job is to defend Obama’s budget on all fronts, but he will be most deeply engaged in […]