Ezra Klein

I agree with Duncan; presidential campaigns don’t really cost that much money. The problem is that individuals are very poor at scaling up their own needs to that of much larger enterprises. So to Ezra Klein, $300 million dollars is an astonishing sum. I could buy 600 sweet houses, or 5,000 luxury cars, or take […]

Life is comprised of actions and reactions. If you touch a hot stove, for instance, you’ll burn your finger. If you listen to Barack Obama speak, you’ll want to have a thousand of his babies. And if you start some overly-funded, ill-considered campaign to restore bipartisanship to Washington, you’ll get a glowing David Broder column. […]

For 300: Wholesale human slaughter never looked so pretty… I’m in.

So why is it that, even though it’s been a busy day, I feel guilty for only putting up three blog posts (and two at Tapped!)? How unhealthily addicted am I to this thing? And why do I care what you people think? You’re not even real people, you’re internet people! For all I know, […]

Steve Benen writes: According to a new NBC/WSJ poll, Sen. John McCain is “facing unexpectedly formidable challenges,” and now trails Rudy Giuliani in a head-to-head match-up by 20 points nationally. The WSJ adds, “All told, 2008 is shaping up as the worst presidential year in three decades to be the candidate of the Republican establishment, […]

I’d never thought of it this way before, but Brendan Sexton makes an interesting point in comments: Another important role that unions play is that they give working people a voice in politics. Conservatives sometimes claim that workers don’t [need] unions anymore because government laws now protect workers. This seems to assume that the government […]

Tyler Cowen has discovered a paper by John DiNardo and David Lee arguing that unions don’t actually raise wages, change productivity, change the number of widgets constructed, or increase the chances that the company will go out of business. In other words, they do nothing, in either direction. Which is odd, given how vociferously employers […]

From the Other Klein, this is an important point: Even the loveliest, sweetest-smelling of pols must place himself in the proximity of scuzzballs these days. John Edwards may not take any PAC contributions, but he probably has more than a few skeevy ambulance chasers contributing to his campaign, one of whom may be involved in […]

As Dean Baker notes, productivity growth is slowing, which may well presage a fairly significant recession. Productivity has been a tricky indicator in recent years, as it used to track quite closely to wage growth, but that link has severed over time, and economists don’t really know why or what to do. In the midst […]

It’s a lucky trick that my utter bafflement over why this administration does not sink $50 million into locking down loose nuclear materials overwhelms the total terror I’d otherwise submit to: On September 9, 2004, a division of Halliburton dispatched from Russia to Houston, via air freight, a diagnostic tool used in oil fields which […]