Ezra Klein

Rick Hertzberg notices some Republicans calling for a payroll tax cut amidst the stimulus and proclaims it a Good Idea. It is a good idea! And I like the endgame, too: Liberals have been reticent, too. The payroll tax now provides a third of federal revenues. And, because it nominally funds Social Security and Medicare, […]

Forgetting the obvious political embarrassment, the fact that Richard Holbrooke served on AIG’s board of directors from 2001-2008 just shows what a farce Wall Street had become. Richard Holbrooke is rather learned about brokering peace in Yugoslavia. But he knows very little about overseeing managers charged with overseeing traders charged with gaming the credit default […]

Obama’s appearance on Leno last night was big news. Huge, in fact. It’s no understatement to say that all of us are anxiously watching the markets today to see how they’ll react to the President of the United States making an off-color joke about how poor his bowling is. Sigh. That said, Obama did make […]

Matt Yglesias’s post sympathizing with the sympathy for Bernie Madoff struck a chord in me. “Was Madoff really a black hat among honest businessmen,” asks Matt, “or was he just one unusually crude player amidst a rotten crowd?” Madoff knew his investment scheme was a fraud. Wall Street should have known their investment schemes were […]

At some point during the campaign, some sly blogger almost certainly joked that an Obama White House would celebrate the Iranian New Year and release transcripts in both English and Persian. They were, as it turns out, utterly prescient. Obama’s message was released at midnight on March 20th, which meant it hit Iran at 7:30am […]

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Noam Scheiber’s post on the retroactive tax on bonuses, and in particular, this bit: “My only hope is that there’s a hidden genius at work here–a kind of unintentional good cop/bad cop routine. That is, maybe the House’s efforts will get the AIG derivatives-meisters to cough up their […]

Robert Farley is right about this: Absent supplementals, the United States currently runs a defense budget of just over half a trillion dollars, a number which does not include defense-related spending in other departments. By the kindest calculations, this means that the U.S. spends roughly four to six times as much on defense as our […]

The House of Representatives just passed a bill levying a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid out since January 1st at any company that’s received more than $5 billion in taxpayer money. Noam Scheiber is unnerved, to say the least. “Getting people to hand over money under the threat of legislation that will take it […]

Willem Buiter is a professor at the London School of Economics, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, and a former Chief Economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In other words: The guy’s got credentials. And over at Vox EU, he’s making a compelling case that […]

Megan McArdle on the public discussion about tax rates: I also note, just as an aside, that the definition of “very rich” seems increasingly to be set at “just above the level a top-notch journalist in a two-earner couple could be expected to pull down”. Funny how that happens. Politics is a game with lots […]