Ezra Klein

For all my whining about twitter, I did enjoy Ana Marie Cox’s live-twittering (tweeting?) of Joe Biden’s Amtrak speech today: I’ll give this to Joe: He is speaking VERY PASSIONATELY (about Amtrak no less!) to a crowd of a dozen people (and twice that of press).I am about 99% sure that Joe is ignoring the […]

Tom Vilsack has done a lot of encouraging things as Secretary of Agriculture. But the original concerns were that the former Governor of Iowa would remain overly enamored of all things corn. According to Tom Laskawy, that’s exactly what’s happening, as Vilsack pushes for more ethanol in gasoline. This is not, as Laskawy explains, the […]

Today’s been a Larry Summers-heavy day on the blog, but then, it’s been a Larry Summers-heavy day in Washington, too. David Leonhardt reports from Summers’ Q&A at Brookings, and a few points jumped out. One is that Summers says “his No. 1 aim had been to persuade people that the economy would not necessarily fix […]

Stephen Laniel comes up with a nice find: An old Larry Summers paper tentatively advocating a small tax on securities transactions. Co-authored with Victoria Summers, it’s called When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case For a Securities Transactions Tax,” and like most arguments for a securities tax, is pretty convincing. The abstract: Unlike […]

Matt Labash isn’t a fan of Facebook and his crankiness leads to some entertaining writing. My problem with Facebook is sort of different. I initially signed up with the social networking behemoth when it was confined to college kids brandishing party cups. My profile was shared with friends and friends alone. There’s nothing embarrassing on […]

Over at Time, Jay Newton-Small reports on the group of 9-11 leadership senators (depends which meeting you’re looking at, and which month) who have been meeting in one of Kennedy’s offices to hammer out the details of health reform. The group includes Baucus and Grassley from Finance, Rockefeller and Hatch of the Finance Subcommittee on […]

Big procedural news — and if this blog believes anything, it’s that there’s no news bigger than procedural news — out of the Senate today where eight Democratic senators signed onto a letter (more letters!) opposing the use of the reconciliation process to pass a cap and trade bill. That means that cap and trade […]

To make a more purely political point on Larry Summers, I felt a helluva lot more confident after his speech than after any of Tim Geithner’s addresses. That may be because Geithner gets the scut work — an actual proposal that can be picked apart — while Summers gets to talk theory, but there it […]

That, according to a speech Larry Summers just gave to the Brookings Institution, is what the Obama administration thinks we’re in. “One of the most important lessons in any introductory economics course,” he said, “is that markets are self-stabilizing. When there is an excess supply of wheat, its price falls. Farmers grow less and others […]

There are times when I feel like I almost can’t avoid dotting every post with health reform angles. For instance: The Atlantic has a new food channel. Fun! And today, it features an article by Zeke Emanuel about what it’s like to dine with Larry David (answer: annoying, though Emanuel doesn’t say that). Zeke Emanuel, […]