Ezra Klein

Apologies for the site going up and down. Our new server is still being house trained.

Must be a calmer week at OMB as Peter Orszag has been throwing up some general policy posts. Of particular interest to health wonks will be this rumination on hospital readmissions. The peg here is a New England Journal of Medicine study that found “that approximately 20 percent of Medicare beneficiaries discharged from a hospital […]

It probably won’t surprise people to learn that back when I was a pothead high schooler in Southern California, I got fairly deep into the policy implications of my avocation. I was on the Students for a Sensible Drug Policy mailing list, yo. I was real. And in that context, I think I frequently repeated […]

There were reports this week that the AFL-CIO was planning to partner with Change to Win and the National Education Association to create a single, mega-federation called the National Labor Coordinating Committee. Many people were very excited. The Obama administration was interested in dealing with a single entity representing organized labor. Liberals were excited in […]

As a follow-up on the previous post, it’s a lot easier to abstractly say that Wall Street compensation should fall than it is to, well, lower it. Closing the hedge fund loophole is a no-brainer, but specifically taxing a particular industry is pretty dicey. In a follow-up Washington Post chat, a reader asked Pearlstein for […]

On April 7th, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, delivered the mea culpa many have been waiting for. Wall Street, he said, “look self-serving and greedy in hindsight.” He admitted that “we rationalized because our self-interest in preserving and growing our market share, as competitors, sometimes blinds us,” and wondered “we collectively neglected to raise […]

Ramesh Ponnuru knows a lot more about health care policy than your garden variety conservative. But his op-ed in yesterday’s The New York Times shows, I think, the difficulty conservatives have discussing this issue. Ponnuru wants to argue that “the goal should not be universal coverage. Reform should simply aim to make health insurance more […]

The pocket furor over bloggers demanding more support from the institutions they promote speaks as strongly to the weirdness of the traditional media business model as to the hopes of the lefty blogosphere. For the last few weeks, I’ve been waking up to e-mails from Mike Allen’s Playbook, the subject lines of which have been, […]

I have serious trouble believe Obama really means to push an immigration reform bill this year. Obama and which congressional sponsors? Kennedy is sick and McCain is angry and few others have the standing or the courage. Him and what political capital? After the banking system, the stimulus, health reform, cap and trade, education, the […]

Kevin Mattson has a nice piece in the latest issue of The Prospect that tries to correct the historical record on Jimmy Carter’s famous malaise speech. Mattson thinks you might have some misconceptions about the address. First, you might think it included the word “malaise.” It didn’t. And you might think it was unpopular. It […]