Ezra Klein

Replying to my earlier thread on state and local tax rates, commenter Skwang asked, “Would it be possible to see a similar chart for some other OECD countries? Such as the UK, Canada, and (everyone’s favorite country to compare to) France?” Sort of! I don’t have the data to make the exact comparisons, but a […]

Ramesh Ponnuru, like many conservatives, would like to rid health care of state insurance mandates. These mandates demand that insurance plans do crazy things like cover maternity care and bone marrow transplants and colon cancer screening (fuller list here). In their absence, some insurers would still cover those things. And some wouldn’t. The question, of […]

Felix Salmon has an (unsurprisingly) sharp post on regulating financial markets that includes this observation: If the purpose of regulation is to avoid market failures, we cannot use, as the instruments of financial regulation, risk-models that rely on market prices, or any other instrument derived from market prices such as mark-to-market accounting. Market prices cannot […]

Gotta say, Scarlett Johannson has extremely sensible views on diet, exercise, and body image.

I really can’t believe David Schuster got away with this segment: (Via the Wonk Room)

My colleague Dana Goldstein has a thoughtful Passover essay exploring the tensions between the artificial certainty that Hebrew schools frequently pair with zionism and the relentless questioning that’s been the hallmark of Diaspora Judaism: Hebrew School taught me that Israel was the Jewish people’s answer to the Holocaust, and that its open immigration policies for […]

So far, we’ve focused on federal tax rates. But there are also state and local taxes. And they tend to be much more regressive. And Catherine Rampell points out that the good folks at Citizens for Tax Justice have tallied up the burdens and produced this nice table: Which allowed me, in turn, to produce […]

Via Annie Lowrey comes news that the International Maritime Bureau keeps a constantly updated map of international piracy with embedded data on the attacks. Check it out: The purple pins are “suspicious vessels,” the yellow “attempted attacks,” and the red “actual attacks.” The picture above is just a screen grab, but if you head over […]

Paul Krugman is right to raise his eyebrows at Barack Obama’s boast that stimulus projects are coming in “ahead of schedule and under budget.” As Paul says, “Ahead of schedule is good. Under budget — well, ordinarily that’s a good thing. But the point of the stimulus is to increase spending! So if we don’t […]

Health wonks will delight in the 137 page document compiling the Senate Finance Committee’s questions to Kathleen Sebelius and her answers. A couple highlights that caught my eye. First, on the individual mandate: Do you support an individual or employer mandate to purchase health coverage as part of health care reform, and if so, how […]