Ezra Klein

Was at the gym this morning and caught this advocacy ad from “Repower America,” Al Gore’s climate change advocacy coalition. The framing caught my eye: “Close the carbon pollution loophole. The stuff from oil and coal that’s destroying the planet? Cap it. And spur new investments in green jobs and clean energy.” There are two […]

“We have literally fallen from the middle-class to potentially having nothing,” says Kate Michelman. But she’s lying. Michelman, the former president of NARAL, was not middle class. You don’t run one of the largest advocacy organizations in the country and make $42,000 a year. Similarly, her husband was a retired college professor. Between the two […]

The New Scientist has a list of 13 things that do not make sense. And they’re right! Those things do not make much sense. But they’re probably more interesting than whatever else you’re doing at 10:30am on a Monday. So reading about them makes a certain amount of sense.

Like many folks in Washington, I’ve been making my way through Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism. The authors are both eminent economists — George Akerlof won the Nobel in 2001 and Robert Shiller has been the among the best and most prescient analysts of bubbles […]

Reading Newsweek‘s profile of Eliot Spitzer’s efforts to edge back into public life is a sort of dizzying experience: It is the thing it’s about. On the one hand, Newsweek is talking to Spitzer about whether he can ever reenter the political conversation. On the other hand, by talking to Newsweek and getting a cover […]

This was largely expected, but it’s big news that the Environmental Protection Agency is readying to issue finally issue its finding that greenhouse-gas emissions endanger public health. Under the provisions of the Clean Air Act, this means that the EPA will be able to begin regulation carbon as a pollutant. In essence, this now gives […]

The Freakonomics blog wonders why standing ovations are so common amongst opera audiences. Are “classical music and theater are being diminished by a…scarcity of negative feedback?” They ask. “What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?” An awful thought (just kidding! Love you guys!). Tyler Cowen thinks the answer is rich people […]

That’s the takeaway from the CBO’s new report on the Troubled Asset Relief Fund. You might wonder how a $700 billion program can return multiple cost estimates. The answer, basically, is that the TARP program’s costs are not simply how much the government spends. They are how much the government spends minus how much they […]

I don’t normally post videos of elephants on this site. Nor videos of dogs. But I do post videos of elephants who are best friends with dogs. Happy Friday.

Mere moments ago, I was complaining that the CBPP’s chart showing percentile income gains for different income quintiles actually understated the situation, as 10 percent of a small salary and 10 percent of a huge salary are not the same amount of money. Turns out that the CBPP also tabulated the data in dollars. They’ve […]