Ezra Klein

Whatever past disagreements I’ve had with Mickey Kaus, he’s absolutely right about this: The LA Times does a piss-poor job covering West Los Angeles. A new paper is needed. And like Kaus says, it should give readers the news they’re interested in: “We want to know whom Mayor Villaraigosa is dating, and we want to […]

Dave Weigel was lucky enough to speak with Rick Scott, the chairman and primary funder of Conservatives for Patient’s Rights, at a lunch yesterday. It’s a pity he didn’t recognize the opportunity. Instead, he chose to buy into the liberal media’s gotcha game and pepper Scott with questions about his forced resignation from Columbia/HSA shortly […]

This post taught me a bit about the Geithner plan and a lot about why I don’t want to play poker against Tom Edsall. Not sure, all things considered, which piece of information will prove most useful in the long-term.

I don’t think I have strong enough opinions on the optimal societal birth rate to intercede in this debate between Matt and Ross. But I do want to point folks to this old Dean Baker article entitled “Stagnation Celebration” if they’re looking for a provocative take on the upside of labor shortages.

This is, in some ways, a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the manifold ways in which the food industry is smart about where we are dumb. Take antioxidants. On some level, I’m aware that no study has decisively proven that they’re on any worth. But I sort of like them anyway. First, their name is […]

At today’s HELP Committee hearing for Kathleen Sebelius, Ranking Republican Mike Enzi delivered the increasingly routine denunciation of the reconciliation process. “I believe if the reconciliation process is used it will be akin to a declaration of war,” he said. The cooperative spirit and constructive process that Enzi prizes — and, at the moment, is […]

This is bad news: Last year, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation — the federal agency that guarantees private pensions — decided to take its $64 billion and move it from bonds to stocks. Better returns that way. And then, of course, the market bottomed out. No one is quite sure what the total losses are, […]

If you feel like scaring yourself a bit this afternoon, read James Hamilton’s post arguing that the conditions are increasingly appropriate for hyperinflation. “To my knowledge,” Hamilton writes, “every hyperinflation in history has had two key ingredients: (1) budget deficits that could not be resolved politically, and (2) a central bank that assumed the obligations […]

I’m not going to try and argue with the case Bibi Netanyahu laid out to Jeffrey Goldberg. Netanyahu and I are not engaged in a dialogue. What i think doesn’t matter. What Netanyahu thinks does matter. So the important thing is that people read Netanyahu in full. Goldberg, to his credit, goes deep on Iran, […]

Congressional expert Norm Ornstein’s has a nice article arguing that the Senate is an increasingly broken and incapable institution. It’s anchored by this graph tracking the rise in filibusters over time. If you want to understand why the earth is likely to heat and why comprehensive health reform is unlikely to pass and why the […]