Ezra Klein

McSweeney’s gave him room to opine: The other day, Nurse Toadstool and I talked in the break room over reheated mushroom casserole. She appeared sad. She mentioned turning a Goomba away because his health insurance wouldn’t give him enough gold coins for treatment. Then I realized why the same viruses continue to appear again and […]

PK does the math: Let’s say the administration finds $100 million in efficiencies every working day for the rest of the Obama administration’s first term. That’s still around $80 billion, or around 2% of one year’s federal spending. Which is why it’s smart for Obama to wrest some headlines by promising $100 million in efficiencies. […]

The Pulitzers are out. Verdict: The New York Times is a good newspaper. Question: When will there be a blog Pulitzer? Or at least an online Pulitzer? If newspapers with a particularly sharp editorial cartoonists can win the prize, surely newspapers with particularly innovative online operations should be in contention. This stuff matters!

Correlation, as they say, is not causation. But the two sure do go together an awful lot. Which is why this chart makes the rounds in certain circles: But though sunspot activity correlates with recessions, it doesn’t correlate with financial crises. The Great Depression was the only economic downturn on the graph to happen in […]

Reading Kate Michelman’s story, Bob McManus asks a good question: “Please help me understand how Obama’s cost-cutting and efficiency proposals would help in this specific case?” Well, his cost-cutting and efficiency proposals wouldn’t. The question is whether his access proposals would. What we basically know of Michelman’s story is this: Her daughter worked with horses. […]

In a letter to Obama today, Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Ted Kennedy, chair of the health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, not only outlined a timeframe for health reform but also put forward a strategy for overcoming the turf warfare of years past. The key bit: Since our committees share […]

Kevin Drum writes that, “Childhood obesity is far higher than it used to be, but it’s not brand new: there have always been kids who were sedentary and ate lots of crappy food. But 30 years ago, these kids just got flabby, they didn’t get diabetes.” The implication is that the rise in childhood obesity […]

Ryan Avent notes that Ben Bernanke’s rousing defense of financial innovation seems peculiarly retro. Bernanke concludes by saying that “I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the 1970s,” but as Avent notes, his examples of worthwhile innovation mostly date back to bell bottoms and the Electric Light Orchestra. “Credit cards, for one, which […]

Was at the gym this morning and caught this advocacy ad from “Repower America,” Al Gore’s climate change advocacy coalition. The framing caught my eye: “Close the carbon pollution loophole. The stuff from oil and coal that’s destroying the planet? Cap it. And spur new investments in green jobs and clean energy.” There are two […]

“We have literally fallen from the middle-class to potentially having nothing,” says Kate Michelman. But she’s lying. Michelman, the former president of NARAL, was not middle class. You don’t run one of the largest advocacy organizations in the country and make $42,000 a year. Similarly, her husband was a retired college professor. Between the two […]