Ezra Klein - Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It - May 31, 2009

Tab Dump

• An interesting interview with the president of the New York Federal Reserve. • Bank lobbyists: Still more powerful than you are. • Gordon Brown's no good, very bad year. • Half as many Harvard grads going into finance. (But...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 6:51 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (8)

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EXCLUSIVE: The Finance Committee's Health Care Timeline

I was given an internal Finance Committee memo today that offers the clearest look yet on the Congress's timetable for health-care reform. Staffers in various Senate offices affirmed that the dates sync with the schedule they've been given. The...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 5:09 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Health Reform
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Charts and Graphs That Will Finally Make It Clear

Economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke have updated their series of charts making the case that "today's crisis is at least as bad as the Great Depression." For my money, this is the most persuasive chart: The one caveat...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 5:06 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Charts and Graphs , Financial Crisis
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Why Have Republicans Been So Bumbling on Sotomayor?

Mark Schmitt has a smart post on the conservative response to Sonia Sotomayor. Where, he asks, is the fearsome conservative message machine in all this? Remember how intimidating the political right used to seem? Liberals used the phrases “echo...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 4:14 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Legal
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Do CEOs Matter?

I've been meaning to link to the Atlantic's exploration of whether CEOs matter for awhile now. But I kept forgetting. And then I hadn't read it recently enough to remember what I wanted to say. Something about the toxic interaction...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 3:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)

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The Health Care Debate Made Very, Very Simple

Matt Yglesias's post on the Blue Dogs' public plan principles is an interesting example of one of the central ironies of the health-care debate. In most cases, individuals arguing that health reform is too expensive are dead-set against policies that...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 2:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (15)

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The Not-Bad, Not-Good Employment News Continues!

We're still in the period of the recession where good trend news is still bad actual news. Economists, for instance, are glad to hear that the economy only lost 345,000 jobs in May. That's quite a bit less than the...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 1:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Economy
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Lunch Break: Impress Your Sweetie Edition

This is a sort of touching thought: Thom had an idea for a date. He wanted to rent a cherry picker, drive it to her door, and pick her up in it. Then, he’d drive to the beach, and get...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 12:31 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Department of Priorities

If I were a fiscally conservative Libertarian-type like Andrew Sullivan or Virginia Postrel, I think I'd spend less time complaining about how Barack Obama should impose radical Medicare reforms to control costs and more time supporting Obama's policy proposal to...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 12:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Why You Should Not Treat the Stock Market Like Gallup

I know, I know, I just linked to Dan Gross's column. It was like, one post ago. Five inches down the page. Guilty as charged. But I wanted to quote this bit without shoehorning it into a separate argument. So...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 11:30 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Financial Crisis , Markets , Solutions
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Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Interest Rate?

The chart atop this post tracks the interest rate of 30-year Treasury bonds since 1977 (click here for a larger version). Does it look like we're at a historic high to you? Probably not. It looks like the rates...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 11:03 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Financial Crisis , Solutions
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Department of Corrections: Michael Gerson vs. the Health Industry

It's also worth noting that Michael Gerson's column contains a pretty significant factual error. He writes: Obama's grand cost-control announcement -- joined by health industry leaders -- of a 1.5 percentage point reduction in health inflation each year was a...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 10:29 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Health Reform
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The Republican Dilemma on Health Care

Michael Gerson's column today is supposed to offer a shot of optimism to Republicans gloomy about their chances in the health-care debate. That certainly wasn't my takeaway, however. In the first few paragraphs, Gerson ably sketches the Achilles heel of...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 10:04 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Health Reform
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What We Are Debating When We Debate Late-Term Abortions

You know what the debate over late-term abortions would benefit from? Some data. Which Dana McCourt provides: Let’s look at the late-term abortions. Only 1.1% are after more than 21 weeks. 21 weeks is about two weeks shy of...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 9:01 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (8)

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Will Single-Payer Supporters Have A Voice? An Interview With Senator Bernie Sanders

Recently, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a single-payer bill into the Senate. The bill hasn't attracted much in the way of co-sponsors, but it's become a rallying point for single-payer supporters who feel locked out of the process. A few...

By Ezra Klein | June 5, 2009; 7:00 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Health Reform , Interviews
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Tab Dump

• Another perspective on Tiananmen Square's "Tank Man." • Bernie Sanders lays out the case for single-payer. • "The Republican Party, and arguably the whole conservative movement, is not the left's biggest enemy at the moment," writes Chris Hayes. •...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 6:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Tab Dump
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Clear Thinking on the Financial New World Order

The International Monetary Fund asked the economist Barry Eichengreen to come up with some out-of-the-box ideas for reforming the global financial architecture. The Wall Street Journal calls the result "Eight Ways to Radically Remake the World," and that's not far...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 5:31 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Financial Crisis , Solutions
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Commentary That's Worth the Pixels It's Printed On

There's a lot of commentary today on Barack Obama's speech to the Muslim world, and I imagine there will be yet more when the op-ed pages publish tomorrow. Most of this commentary doesn't matter. This speech wasn't for Americans. It...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 5:05 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Bob Bennett's Peculiar Fear of British Health Care

Utah's Bob Bennett is certainly one of the GOP's most learned senators on health care reform. Which is why it's so disappointing to hear him lashing out with this kind of nonsense: “The sticking point in this entire debate is...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 4:06 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: Health Reform , Health of Nations
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As Long As Everyone is in Agreement

Thinking a bit more about EJ Dionne's column today, one of the reasons Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh get taken very seriously by the media is that there's ample evidence that they speak for, and are influential among, a significant...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 3:42 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Derivatives for Farmers

In the continuing congressional saga in which each and every committee tries to grab a piece of the financial crisis, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry is holding a hearing on derivatives. And this, actually, makes some sense...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 2:36 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Financial Crisis
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Why the Public Plan Is a Fundamentally Conservative Idea

I've been trying to figure out how to make this sound like more than a cute argument, because I think it's actually a point my conservative friends should seriously consider. In general, there are two ways for firms to adopt...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 1:55 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: Health Reform
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When Our Powers Combine!

One of the things that often gets missed on the debate around policies is the interaction between policies. Christina Romer mentioned this a bit in our interview, but CAP's Igor Volsky expands on the idea today. Take two policies...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 12:45 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Health Reform
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I Think the Term is "Overton Window"

This is a very smart column by EJ Dionne....

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 12:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Geithner's Plan Is Dead

The toxic loans portion of Tim Geithner's Public Private Investment Program looks to be officially dead: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. indefinitely postponed a central element of the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan Wednesday, acknowledging that it could not persuade...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 11:48 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: Financial Crisis
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Are Doctors Like Halliburton?

The Times has a smart op-ed this morning by Peter Bach, a pulmonary specialist and occasional health-care bureaucrat who wants to see Medicare become a bit more competitive. Bach's basic insight is that Medicare is like a no-bid contract for...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 11:26 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Health Reform
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Obama's Speech in Cairo (Transcript)

There's an impulse to write an extremely long post on the import of Barack Obama's speech this morning. But I think that's the wrong direction. This is an important enough document that the value of this blog is in...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 10:30 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Obama administration
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Your Recession in Graphs: The Jared Diamond Take on the Downturn

I'd heard that the United States, despite falling into recession earlier, was actually experiencing it with relatively less severity. But I hadn't understood the extent of the variation until now: That graphic -- a contribution of Stratfor Global Intelligence --...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 9:03 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (0)

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What Wal-Mart Giveth, Wal-Mart Taketh Away

I've always found the effect of Wal-Mart to be a complicated issue. On one hand, it's monomaniacal obsession with lowering prices has certainly reduced the cost of basic goods for a mainly low-income customer base. Good thing! But it doesn't,...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 8:00 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (12)

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Does Cooking Make Us Human?

Harvard-based biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham thinks cooking made us human. And though I have no real way of evaluating his argument, it certainly seems plausible: Historians of the deep human past generally consider cooking to be a recent activity. A...

By Ezra Klein | June 4, 2009; 7:00 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Books , Food
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Tab Dump

• Conor Clarke has a new blog! • Want to know why Archie won't marry Betty? It's cause she's a psychopath. • I cook, therefore I am. • Can (another) math geek save Wall Street? • The ethics of politically...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 6:30 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Does The Government Run Health Care Better?

Health-care bloggers Merrill Goozner and Joe Paduda are talking about one of my favorite ideas: expanding the Veterans Health Administration to non-veterans. To understand why this would be a good idea, read Phil Longman's definitive article on the subject. I've...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 6:18 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (14)
Categories: Health Reform
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What MedPAC Recommendations Look Like

I've talked a lot today about MedPAC recommendations. It occurred to me that I should, you know, actually link to some so you can see what they look like. So here are MedPAC's March recommendations on reforming the Medicare payment...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 5:41 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Health Reform , Medicare
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How Obama Plans to Reform Medicare

"To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress," writes Barack Obama in his letter...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 3:11 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Health Reform
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I Plan to Do This Summer

I felt pretty affected by David Foster Wallace's death. Surprisingly so. I'd never been a big fan of his books. Never touched "Infinite Jest." Found his nonfiction circuitous and self-indulgent. (Consider the Lobster, however, is quite brilliant.) But still. For...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 3:09 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (13)
Categories: Books
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Gluttons for Health Wonkery

Did you read my interview with Christina Romer this morning and think to yourself, "That's great, but I'd like to read a lot more from Romer, and then see her discuss her conclusions with health economists David Cutler and Mark...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 2:37 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Health Reform
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What Will Become of the Federal Reserve?

Felix Salmon has a smart post analyzing the meta-message of Ben Bernanke's testimony this morning. Bernanke, Salmon notes, "starts with 7 paragraphs on general economic conditions, continues with five more paragraphs on the state of the financial sector, and then...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 2:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Federal Reserve , Financial Crisis , Solutions
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Lunch Break: The Recession Kitchen

This one is quite literal. I really liked the cover of our Food section today: An ode to the cheap tools we can't live without. A seasoned wok, says Scott Reitz (whose blog makes him my home-cook-crush). A corkscrew, says...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 12:52 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (28)
Categories: Food , Lunch Break
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That 1.5 Percent

Yeah, so it's a heavy health-care day here on the blog. Big whoop, wanna fight about it? Didn't think so. In my interview with Christina Romer, I asked about the sudden emergence of the talismanic "1.5 percentage points." In the...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 12:27 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Health Economics , Health Reform
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Pawlenty Retires

The buzz on Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty's decision not to run again for his position is that it clears the way for him to run for president in 2012. Which seems true. But that's not just because it gives him...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 11:45 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: 2012 Presidential
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Why Health Reform Is Likely to Have a Public Plan

Huffington Post's Ryan Grim has been doing great work covering Sen. Ben Nelson's (D-Neb.) endless flips and flops on the public health insurance plan. A few weeks ago, you might remember that Nelson was talking about forming a "coalition...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 11:17 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Health Reform
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It Could Have Been Worse.

After taking a few shots from Jack Welch, Joe Stiglitz and Meredith Whitney at a Vanity Fair/Bloomberg panel, Council of Economic Advisers member Austan Goolsbee fired back with a pretty rousing defense of administration policy. Look, we enter[ed] the government...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 10:30 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Financial Crisis , Solutions
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News Break: How the White House Hopes to Control Health Care Costs

You've heard the line that "entitlement reform is health reform." Yesterday, at a meeting between Barack Obama and Senate Democrats from the Finance and HELP committees, that line grew up and graduated into something altogether sturdier: A policy. Senate...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 9:30 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: Health Reform
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'A Weird Sort of Victory' at the USDA

That's what food activist Tom Laskawy calls the stalemate at the USDA. The basic lay of the land is that the industry is clashing with consumer activists over who should lead the agency's Food Safety and Inspection Service. A variety...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 9:03 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Food
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An Exclusive Interview With Christina Romer

Yesterday, I wrote a couple of posts on the report issued by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers laying out "The Economic Case for Health Reform." It was, I thought, an important document, as it was the fullest...

By Ezra Klein | June 3, 2009; 7:00 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Health Reform , Interviews
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Is This Socialism?

TAP's Tim Fernholz has a nice, clear rejoinder to the charge that the GM takeover is "socialism": It's fair to call the General Motors deal or the AIG takeover examples of socialist policy; government is directly intervening in a private...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 4:26 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (9)
Categories: Economic Policy , Financial Crisis , Solutions
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The Tyranny of the Economists

Matt Yglesias has an interesting post on "prestige cross-pollination," which he defines as "the habit of distinguished economists using prestige acquired within their field to pass off sloppy work in other fields." As example, he offers up Greg Mankiw's...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 4:12 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (17)
Categories: Economic Policy , Obama administration
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My Colleagues Like Gambling Metaphors

This comes courtesy of Postie Neil Irwin: To suggest a mildly more degenerate metaphor for your post on securities vs. derivatives: Buying a security is like buying a racehorse. If it does well, you will make money, if it does...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 3:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Financial Crisis
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Blogging the CEA Report: What's Up With Medicare?

You've heard, by now, the constant refrain that entitlement reform is health reform. This next graph, also from the Council of Economic Advisers health care report, helps show why: Two lines there. The one that shoots upwards shows the cost...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 2:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Health Economics , Health Reform
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Blame Prop 13!

Earlier today, reader James wrote in to berate me for ignoring the role Proposition 13 has played in California's fiscal woes. He's right! But I see no reason to detail the situation when Harold Meyerson has already done such a...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 1:45 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: California
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Blogging the CEA Health Care Report: Why Workers Aren't Angrier About Health Care

Here's a counterintuitive thought: Health care reform is a pretty big issue in the United States. Arguably the biggest domestic issue there is. But it's a much smaller issue than it should be. That's not meant as a normative statement....

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 1:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (8)
Categories: Health Economics , Health Reform
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Lunch Break

Anyone remember Taco Town, the "Saturday Night Live" spoof that became a cult hit a couple years back? Turns out Applebee's took the video as a brainstorming session. They recently introduced the Quesadilla Burger, which won one of the Center...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 12:34 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Food , Lunch Break
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Blogging the CEA Health Care Report: Executive Summary

The Council of Economic Advisers is not assuming anything radical. Health care reform will not chop, slice, and juice. It will not yoke the growth in health care spending to the rise in GDP or the swell of inflation....

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 11:40 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Health Economics , Health Reform
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Derivatives Defined. Thrice.

The The Wall Street Journal catches an embarrassing slip over at the Securities and Exchange Commission: A press release they put out quotes their Los Angeles office director referring to "derivatives" when she meant "securities." Yipes. It's all the worse...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 11:16 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Financial Crisis
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How the Health Care Industry Promises to Save You Money

Remember that coalition of health industry stakeholders who came together to promise President Barack Obama $2 trillion in voluntarily achieved savings over 10 years? They've released their specifics (pdf). It's a bit hard to say what the numbers would add...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 10:30 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: Health Reform
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Is California Getting a Raw Deal?

This is an original spin on the California fiscal crisis from Neil Sinhababu: "Californians only get back 78 cents for each dollar of federal taxes, ranking it 43rd of 50 for money tossed back into the state." I'd seen...

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 10:03 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (9)
Categories: California
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How Come the Different Flavors of Libertarianism All Taste the Same?

Bruce Bartlett has a nice column on the large differences, and essential similarities, between libertarians as they exist in the country and libertarians as they exist in Washington, D.C. First, the differences: [M]ost self-described libertarians are primarily motivated by economics....

By Ezra Klein | June 2, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Permalink | Comments (16)

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Tab Dump

• The many guises of Arianna Huffington. • What should we do with the detainee photos? • "As a philosophy, their libertarianism doesn't extent much beyond not wanting to pay taxes, being paid in gold and being able to keep...

By Ezra Klein | June 1, 2009; 6:26 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Kaiser Health News

I'm pretty excited by the launch of Kaiser Health News. And not just because it's an outlet that promises to provide me with even more health wonkery, or because it means the brilliant Kate Steadman has a blog again. In...

By Ezra Klein | June 1, 2009; 5:48 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Journalism
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MSNBC at 4pm Eastern

I'll be talking about George Tiller....

By Ezra Klein | June 1, 2009; 3:42 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Is Oprah Winfrey Bad For Your Health?

I didn't exactly wake up this morning thinking, "what I need to read is a brutal, almost overwhelming, takedown of the pseudoscience and snake oil that has come to define a large chunk of Oprah Winfrey's show and brand." But...

By Ezra Klein | June 1, 2009; 3:30 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Sonia Sotomayor and the Problem of Race

Megan McArdle has one of the best commentaries I've seen on the right's decision to make race the central issue in Sonia Sotomayor's nomination: HL Mencken once defined Fundamentalism as "the terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having...

By Ezra Klein | June 1, 2009; 3:00 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (5)

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It Was Lyndon Johnson in the Roosevelt Room with the Tax Cut!

I'm pretty confused by Robert Samuelson's column today. He's arguing that the press should be more skeptical of Barack Obama's policy initiatives, but the historical evidence he brings to the question seems peculiar: All "reforms" do not succeed; some cause...

By Ezra Klein | June 1, 2009; 2:05 PM ET | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Economic Policy , History , Obama administration
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Network News

Ezra Klein: May 31, 2009 - June 6, 2009