Ezra Klein

After Texas Governor Rick Perry fired up a Tea Party audience by musing about secession as a response to federal tax rates, I spent most of the day idly considering what it would look like for America if Texas seceded from the union. More trains! Universal health care! An end to an important hybrid food […]

I feel like I might have posted this before, but if you’re still confused about securitized finance and collateralized debt obligations and trancheing and pooling and all the other terms thrown about with increasing frequency these days, this paper explaining structured finance is a good place to start. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Andrew Sullivan has been running something of an anecdata series on “why healthcare costs so much.” Some of the posts have been quite good, like this missive on Sweden and this explanation of the “Burger King”-ethos that pervades emergency rooms. But there are rigorous examinations of this question that also deserve a look. In February […]

Some of you may follow the food blog I write with a bunch of friends. Some of you may just be interested in expertly crafted cocktails. Either way, we’re having our first-ever IFA-happy hour at DC’s PS7 tonight. Festivities go from 6pm-to-8pm. Come!

Some useful context on tax rates from The Washington Post: As thousands of anti-tax protesters rallied across the nation yesterday and the president promised tax cuts for most, new data showed that the federal income tax burden is already hovering near its lowest level in three decades for all but the wealthiest Americans. The nonpartisan […]

The Washington Post has a good piece today on the role of consumer psychology in recessions. In particular, they focus on what they call “the could-spend-if-they-want-to consumers” — the folks with $90,000 incomes and no real likelihood of unemployment who have nevertheless cut their consumption sharply. Recessions have what some economists call a “downward multiplier.” […]

And here I thought I wore blue jeans because they don’t wrinkle. How wrong I was! Salvation, George Will explains, is easy enough. “For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule,” he writes. “If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don’t wear it.” And Fred Astaire was pretty fly. But the […]

The standard history of health reform is that for most of the early-20th Century, attempts at change were pummeled by the all-powerful American Medical Association. In his book National Health Insurance, Gerard Boychuck has a good revisionist take on this narrative. Among other things, the AMA spent most of 1949 denouncing Harry Truman’s plans as […]

Carter Dougherty is reading some briefs from the European Central Bank and learning that they’re pretty freaked about the state of the American consumer: The facts are pretty straightforward. National economies rev up – or not – based on what business spends (known as investment), what households buy (consumption) and what is bought or sold […]