Ezra Klein

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“It’s not a goodbye post,” a friend just said to me. “It’s a ‘see you later’ post.” And that’s probably true. This will be my last real blog post at The American Prospect. This site will go dark for the rest of the week. On Monday, it will move to the Washington Post (the archives […]

This morning, some conservative groups expended a lot of energy hyping a document that seemed to show the Office of Management and Budget — and hence the Obama administration — opposes the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant. That was a bad idea, because it’s just given the OMB a […]

I’ve written often on the strategic mistake the unions made uniting behind the specific solution of card check rather than the general problem of unfair barriers to workers who want to organize. But I’m starting to wonder if the business community hasn’t made the same mistake in reverse. They’ve done a damn good job burying […]

The Annual Trustees Report is out today, telling us something akin to what we already knew: Medicare and Social Security are in bad shape, and getting worse. The headlines will emphasize the dates of insolvency. Medicare runs out of money in 2017, two years earlier than anticipated by last year’s report. Social Security falls in […]

The White House released some new numbers on the stimulus today. The one that’s getting the most attention is $92,000. That’s how much it will cost to create or preserve each stimulus-related job. Do I even need to relay the snarky rejoinder to this? But the number is more complicated than it seems. Building a […]

One of the reasons I like reading Patrick Ruffini is he has a tendency to grapple with, rather than downplay, troublesome evidence. Here he is, for instance, on Obama’s personal popularity: Obama’s personal popularity stayed remarkably stable throughout the course of the campaign, and the average unfavorable rating barely ever cracked 35%. Obama the campaigner […]

There’s some evidence that demand for Treasury debt might be waning. That makes sense on a number of levels: Deficits look bad and so the risk of default — though quite small — inevitably inches upwards. There are signals that other markets are stabilizing and their products may once again be worth investing in — […]

I don’t really like writing defenses of “comparative effectiveness review.” It makes me despair for our country. We’re literally talking about the process of gathering evidence so we know how well various medical treatments work. It’s worth saying, however, that there are two types of objections to gathering evidence, and they’re being unfortunately conflated. The […]

The Wall Street Journal has a very cool interactive graphic today allowing you to compare the stress test results for different banks. I’m not sure what you actually gain from the exercise — all these banks seem certain to survive the downturn, and Feds insure individual deposits anyway — but it’s a good way to […]