Ezra Klein

I don’t really like writing defenses of “comparative effectiveness review.” It makes me despair for our country. We’re literally talking about the process of gathering evidence so we know how well various medical treatments work. It’s worth saying, however, that there are two types of objections to gathering evidence, and they’re being unfortunately conflated. The […]

The Wall Street Journal has a very cool interactive graphic today allowing you to compare the stress test results for different banks. I’m not sure what you actually gain from the exercise — all these banks seem certain to survive the downturn, and Feds insure individual deposits anyway — but it’s a good way to […]

I know that Janet Napolitano is floating around on the White House’s short list. I don’t really understand why: She’s neither very liberal nor a great legal thinker nor armed with radically different life experiences than most members of the governmental elite. Rather, she was an effective moderate politician and, before that, an apparently skilled […]

I’m having an enjoyably wonky morning watching the Senate Finance Committee roundtable on options for funding health care reform. You can stream the meeting here. But for a clear and straightforward look at the ideas and issues involved, this bit of testimony from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities is as good an introduction […]

I’ve argued before that you can compare a perfect-world carbon tax to a perfect-world cap and trade proposal, or a realistic carbon tax to a realistic cap and trade proposal, but you can’t compare a perfect-world carbon tax to a realistic cap and trade proposal. Today, Kevin Drum draws that argument out at length: Cap-and-trade […]

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: Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy The opponents of health reform are, at this juncture, entirely isolated. Industry is adopting […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]