Ezra Klein

Interesting point from Robert Dallek: War kills reform. Every time we’ve had a major commitment to a war, it has killed a reform movement. Progressivism was done in by the Spanish-American war. Populism by World War I. FDR said Dr. New Deal has been replaced by Dr. War. The Great Society by the Vietnam War. […]

The Center for American Progress has a panel this morning on legislative change amidst turbulence. In particular, the question is whether health care benefits from a window of political opportunity opened by the financial crisis, or simply gets ejected from the agenda. Historian Robert Dallek, who’s written extensively on Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, […]

James Surowiecki argues that John Thain, CEO of Merrill Lynch, deserves the $10 million bonus he asked for this year. Surowiecki’s argument on Thain’s performance makes sense, but it underscores how weird Wall Street’s “bonus” culture is. Why does Thain deserve $10 million extra dollars for doing his job? And, on a broader level, this […]

In this month’s issue of The American Prospect, I reviewed The Private Abuse of the Public Interest: Market Myths and Policy Muddles, by Lawrence D. Brown and Lawrence R. Jacobs, and The Case for Big Government, by Jeff Madrick. An excerpt: The most telling line in Lawrence Brown and Lawrence Jacobs’ The Private Abuse of […]

I did a bit of this last year, and folks seemed to like it, and the economy will collapse if you all don’t spend some money, so this week, I’m going to offer a few Christmas gift recommendation posts. The links here will route through my Amazon associates account, meaning that whatever you buy through […]

Maybe I’m missing something, but it sure seems like a strange decision for Democrats to put the auto industry, and $25 billion, under the supervision of a single Bush appointee who hasn’t even been named. The only real rationale I can see is that they don’t want to be the bad guys demanding concessions from […]

In the category of Things I’ve Been Meaning to Link To, Jon Gruber had a nice op-ed last week in the ways that health care reform could be used for immediate economic stimulus. The big player here is immediate aid to states for Medicaid and S-CHIP. In recessions, wages go down and jobs are lost, […]

Karl Rove is beginning to tease his upcoming memoirs, and told the Austin Statesman that part of the Bush administration’s problem was that “there were people who never accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush and acted accordingly.” Rove promises to name names in the upcoming book. But look, for the first four years of […]

David Leonhardt has a nice review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers that focuses in on a point with relevance far beyond where you should read the book: These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, […]