Ezra Klein

I asked my friend Ben Miller, a program associate at the New America Foundation, to weigh in on the somewhat-obscure but terribly-important changes that Obama is proposing to the Pell Grant program. He kindly did so. What follows comes from him. Pell grant’s currently occupy a weird space where they are an entitlement, but are […]

Mike Scherer’s musings on how the Politico is transforming Time‘s approach to news actually confused me a bit. It’s not that his post isn’t good, as it is. But Mike laments the death of the absolute worst convention in journalism: The 1,000 word wrap-up article. The subject here is Cheney’s Sunday interview. Mike was readying […]

That’s the implication of Noam Scheiber’s profile of Summers, which suggests that Summers has become too much of a courteous institutionalist to fling Geithner out of the way and do what must be done: [W]hen it comes to the bank bailout, the consensus is that Summers has scrupulously respected Geithner’s turf. It’s not that Summers […]

I’ve been trying to decide what I think of Bryan Caplan’s argument that pundits should place public bets on their predictions. It imposes accountability through the threat public humiliation, and you can see the upside: Predictions are currently offered without any fear that their accuracy will be systematically recorded. Dedicated debunkers occasionally comb the archives […]

Carrie Budoff Brown reports that the bipartisan group of senators meeting to hammer out health reform now has a snappy name: The Board of Directors. Which fits the trend. The Board has given access to both the Politico and Time in the past week. They’re looking for credit. Which is probably a good thing: Senators […]

The New York Times reports that Obama is open to taxing health care benefits despite having opposed a similar proposal amidst the campaign. You’ll excuse me a moment of journalistic chest-thumping if I note that I broke this story almost a month ago. That said, there are some caveats to the New York Times’ report. […]

Clay Shirky has a brilliant essay that thinks the unthinkable. “The people committed to saving newspapers,” he writes, “[demand] to know ‘If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?’ To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet […]

NBC was plugging today’s “ECONOMIC SHOWDOWN” on Meet The Press. The combatants? Christina Romer and Eric Cantor. A credentialed macroeconomist and some guy who helps congressional Republicans figure out their messaging. And the pity is that that’s actually a pretty accurate depiction of the country’s economic debate.

Got the letter the Blue Dogs sent to the House and Senate Budget Committees. As reported earlier, it’s four sentences of relative predictability. “We are writing in full support of the Administration’s efforts to require that any health care reform package considered by Congress be deficit-neutral.” And so on. If you love letters, I’ve put […]

I can’t tell if Jagdish Baghwati is being coy in his analysis of the union movement or is simply pretty detached from that sphere of inquiry, but in any case, the reason the AFL-CIO is more focused on trade than the SEIU is not because the two have an intellectual disagreement over the causes of […]