THRONE-KISSERS. I’ve spent a bit of time this morning puzzling over the meaning of a pretty opaque Jonah Goldberg post. It’s my Tuesday timewaster! In it, he responds to Jon Cohn‘s smart article on the successes of the French health care system and my warning that the size of government isn’t particularly determinative of economic […]
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein is a former Prospect writer and current editor-in-chief at Vox. His work has appeared in the LA Times, The Guardian, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Slate, and The Columbia Journalism Review. He’s been a commentator on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, and more.
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Leave The AMT Be
Daniel Gross writes: The Republicans’ main argument against Democrats is that they’ll raise taxes by letting the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010. Fix the AMT now and it will simply allow Republicans to argue that the Democrats are raising taxes in 2007 and 2008, too. What’s more, fixing the AMT permanently provides all the […]
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Easter Egging
In a rare moment of levity, a bunch of Your Favorite Bloggers and I took Easter morning off from considering the great issues of our age and painted eggs. The results are here. I, it should be said, am quite bad at this, and so aside from Super Egg, also created Broke Egg (because I […]
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LITTLE DISPUTE. …
LITTLE DISPUTE. You know, whenever you read someone saying, “There is little dispute among economists that [blah blah blah],” it’s probably a safe assumption that “blah blah blah” actually engenders huge amounts of dispute. Economists dispute everything, and anything they’re actually of one mind on tends to be too banal to write about. Take Kevin […]
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A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words
The “complexity” of reform proposals is often used to diminish their chances of survival. But, aside from not being so complicated (everything’s complicated if you drill sufficiently deep into it), they’re mainly tough to absorb because we’re taking in all the facets of the health care system at once. At the moment, we don’t do […]
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Cannon and Tanner Part 2
Michael Cannon has a defense of his op-ed up over at Cato’s blog. He focuses mainly on the argument that health insurance isn’t the most cost effective way to improve health, which is certainly a supportable point. But that wasn’t the portion of his op-ed I primarily objected to. What angered me was the sentence […]
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It’s The Tiniest Violin In The World, Playing Just For You, High Culture
The Washington Post article placing a world class violinist at the entrance to a Metro station and seeing if anyone noticed certainly sounds annoying, but also totally brilliant. That there’s some darn fine gimmick writing. After all, if you want to write a crotchety essay on how the world moves too damn fast and music […]
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One More Thought on the AMT
It’s worth saying, too, that issues like the AMT and college tuition deductibility are inevitable and annoying focuses of the Democratic Party. They are, in effect, attempts at economic relief for the middle and upper middle classes. The middle class sort of controls electoral politics in this country, so such focuses are inevitable. What would […]
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Democrats and the AMT
I sort of wonder whether Tyler Cowen actually read this article on Democratic attempts to reform the Alternative Minimum Tax. Responding to the news that Democrats are “preparing legislation that would permanently shield all but the very richest taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax,” Tyler writes, “this rather non-egalitarian policy, very costly in terms of […]
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SECURITY LINE PAYBACK….
SECURITY LINE PAYBACK. To add onto the chilling story Scott relates below, when the Bush administration uses airport harassment as a way to punish critics of the president, they degrade the actual effectiveness of putting individuals on watch lists at all. The more folks — both travelers and airport workers — who believe the lists […]