Ezra Klein

Imagine a very tiny country. Very tiny. Five people. Four of them make $100 a year. One of them makes $1,000 a year. Tinyville, however, has a regressive tax code. The four poorest are taxed at 30 percent of their incomes. The richest is taxed at 20 percent. Here, essentially, is the taxation scheme in […]

As Mark Penn so presciently observed, the kids today are obsessed with snipers. And understandably so. This sort of thing is chillingly impressive: If the pirates’ heads were fully exposed, it would have been an easy shot. A sniper rifle is accurate to within a “minute of angle,” provided the shooter can keep his or […]

CNN provides: A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds Americans don’t agree with former Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that President Obama’s actions have increased the chances of a terrorist attack against the United States. A whopping 72% of those questioned in the poll disagree with Cheney’s view that some of Obama’s actions have put […]

Picture an upside-down pyramid with its narrow tip at the bottom and its base on top. The only way the pyramid can stand is by spinning fast enough or by having a wide enough tip so it won’t fall down. The federal version of this spinning top is the tax code; the government collects its […]

Catherine Rampell notes that the X Prize Foundation — the fine folks last seen awarding $10 million to the inventor able to build a better space ship — has partnered with the insurance company Wellpoint to offer $10 million to the person with the best idea for redesigning the American health care system. It’s a […]

Obama had a nice line recently. Being president means you’re faced with a lot of hard problems, he said. If the problems weren’t hard, after all, then someone would have solved them before they got to you. That’s usually true, at least. But the student loan program is a simple problem. I’m going to let […]

How to celebrate talk like a modern pirate day. To add a sliver of commentary to that (pretty awesome) link, I sympathize with folks who wanted to rename the pirates “maritime terrorists” or “seaborne warlords” or whatever else. “Pirates” called up a certain image, and it wasn’t murderous, hungry Somalis. The word “pirate” essentially went […]

Paul Carrington writes up the only thing older than the justices on the Supreme Court: The argument that justices on the Supreme Court should retire earlier. And he’s right! But he doesn’t mention one of the main reasons justices retire: Uncertainty about their replacements. Thurgood Marshall, for instance, is the archetypal example of a justice […]

On Friday, I wrote a response to Ramesh Ponnuru’s New York Times op-ed arguing that we don’t need universal coverage in health care. Cato’s Michael Cannon rose to his defense. Over the weekend, a reader e-mailed a reply that’s worth posting in full. What comes next is a quote from Cannon, and then the reader’s […]

The Washington Post reports on a new study by Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen Mazza, and Susan Scholz that quantified returns on a lobbying effort to enact a single tax break in 2004. The one-time change to the tax code benefited 800 companies, allowing researchers to go back and look at how much the various beneficiaries […]