Ezra Klein: September 12, 2010 - September 18, 2010

Reconciliation

Recap: The Obama administration's pipe dreams; Paul Ryan's blue-sky plan for the economy; and the problem of invisible subsidies. Elsewhere: Just one link today: Joe Klein's dispatch from his road trip to talk with voters in different states. Rings truer...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 6:30 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (15)
 
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Invisible spending

Andrew Biggs makes the important point that an enormous amount of government spending is driven by spending or benefits for middle and upper-class Americans. In particular, he fingers Social Security, Medicare, and, puzzlingly, Medicaid, which I wouldn't put in that...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 5:43 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (19)
Categories:  Taxes  
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The difference between the parties

The fight over 1099 reform is one of the best case studies of the differences between Republicans and Democrats that we've seen this year. Quick background: 1099 reform deals with a tax change in the health-care bill. The provision seeks...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 4:35 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (32)
Categories:  Health Reform, Taxes  
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The Obama administration's pipe dreams

The White House held a conference call today for Elizabeth Warren and various bloggers and writers. Most of it was what you'd expect, but Warren did mention that Rep. Barney Frank once told her that getting a Consumer Financial...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 3:27 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (24)
Categories:  Obama administration  
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Elizabeth Warren on Elizabeth Warren

This is a useful post from my colleague Ariana Eunjung Cha rounding up some of Warren's speeches and writings. As a rule, things said by Elizabeth Warren tend to be more interesting than things said about Elizabeth Warren. But I'd...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 2:41 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
 
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Blue Sky series: Paul Ryan's plan

Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 2:31 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (30)
Categories:  Blue sky series  
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Lunch break

I agree with Alyssa Rosenberg that the new R. Kelly song is pretty great, and that the video is sharp. But does it look to anyone else like Kelly's jacket is covered in dandruff?...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 12:19 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
 
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The problem with exports

Here's a partial list of the countries trying to export their way out of economic trouble: Germany. Japan. China. The United States of America. Malaysia. Thailand. The Philippines. South Korea. India, Brazil. And that's really quite partial. On some level,...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 11:55 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (1)
 
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The understaffed Fed

Speaking of the government's confirmation crisis, what does it mean for the Fed's vice chairman and two of its governors to be tied up in the Senate? Well, nothing good: Each of the Fed governors has some administrative responsibility...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 11:33 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (4)
Categories:  Federal Reserve  
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Public service annoucement

You don't need to change your car's oil every 3,000 miles....

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 11:27 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (9)
 
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Elizabeth Warren and the government's talent crisis

Elizabeth Warren has a blog post* over at WhiteHouse.gov reassuring people that she's quite happy about her new job: The President asked me, and I enthusiastically agreed, to serve as an Assistant to the President and Special Advisor to the...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 10:24 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (20)
 
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Who will lead the Republicans?

I'm guessing that a Republican takeover of Congress would lead to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner. But according to Public Policy Polling, that would disappoint a lot of Republicans: Usually it's the party that...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 10:15 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (32)
Categories:  2010 Midterms, Polls  
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Small-business bill passes -- but what's there to say about it?

It's common to hear complaints -- some of them coming from me -- that the media's coverage of legislation is heavy on process stories, outrageous statements and other signposts of political conflict, and light on the underlying substance of the...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 9:00 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
 
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Wonkbook: Small biz bill passes; Warren's powers uncertain; DREAM Act

Harry Reid's long, national nightmare is finally over. Yesterday, Senate Democrats joined with two Republicans to finally pass the small-business lending bill. The legislation itself is a fairly modest measure to help small businesses access credit and lower their...

By Ezra Klein  | September 17, 2010; 6:36 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (12)
Categories:  Wonkbook  
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Reconciliation

Recap: My ambivalence on Elizabeth Warren's interim appointment; the Senate's time-crunch; and the anonymous hedge fund manager's blue-sky growth plan. Elsewhere: 1) America will spend $1 billion on political advertising in 2010; $40 billion on weight-loss products. 2) PowerPoint isn't...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 6:44 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (1)
 
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Gray's D.C.

Here are some of the groups that endorsed Vince Gray's "populist revolt": The D.C. Chamber of Commerce, the Maryland and District of Columbia Credit Unions Association, the local AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, Greater Greater Washington's Dave Alpert, and the Association...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 5:50 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (12)
 
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The poverty numbers you should worry about

The 2009 Census numbers are out, and the news is about as grim as we expected. Poverty jumped to 14.3 percent, the number of people without health-care insurance broke 50 million for the very first time and median household income...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 4:40 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
Categories:  Economy  
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Blue Sky series: The anonymous hedge-fund manager's plan

Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how many...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 3:49 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (13)
Categories:  Blue sky series  
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Voinovich leaning against extension of the Bush tax cuts

I've been criticizing a lot of politicians over the past few days for proposing indefinite extensions of the Bush tax cuts without saying a word about how they'd handle the resulting damage to the deficit. There's one, however, who isn't...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 1:40 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
Categories:  Taxes  
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Lunch Break

Everyone knows -- or thinks they know -- that kids are the only ones who can really learn new languages, but new research is showing that the adult brain has some tricks up its sleeve, too....

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 1:33 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
 
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Elizabeth Warren cont'd

Jon Cohn talked to some folks and came away with a generally optimistic take on Elizabeth Warren's interim nomination. Same goes for Matt Yglesias. I'm still a bit more ambivalent. First, I mistrust decisions that can be easily spun in...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 12:38 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (22)
 
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Public employees don't make more than private employees

There seems to be a lot of jealousy toward public employees out there, most of it powered by an impression that public employees get more money for less work. But via Kevin Drum comes this table from the Economic Policy...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 11:04 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (48)
 
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Health-care reform polling poorly

Jon Cohn updates us on the state of health-care reform's polling: The last few polls on health care reform have been discouraging. Public support for the Affordable Care Act does not seem to be rising. If anything, it seems...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 10:38 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (24)
Categories:  Polls  
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Time bombing the Senate

A few facts: 1. The nominations of Janet Yellen to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, as well as Sarah Bloom Raskin and Peter Diamond to be members of the Fed’s board, are languishing in the Senate. “We’ve got...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 10:24 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (6)
Categories:  Senate  
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Wonkbook: Warren as temp; China bill; Why your lightbulb is not made in America

The Obama administration will appoint Elizabeth Warren to oversee the creation of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection in a temporary capacity. Confused? So, frankly is everyone else. The upside for the administration is that Warren dodges a Senate...

By Ezra Klein  | September 16, 2010; 5:46 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (12)
Categories:  Wonkbook  
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Reconciliation

Recap: The tea parties are going to transform the incumbents who survive their primaries, too; extending the Bush tax cuts would add more to the deficit than everything President Obama has done put together; and what I'd like to hear...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 6:40 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
 
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Elizabeth Warren to be appointed to ... something

Or so Jake Tapper reports: President Obama will announce this week that Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who first proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will be named to a special position reporting to both him and to...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 5:28 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (6)
 
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Food as art

I really like looking at, and thinking about, food that's self-consciously designed as art. Unlike modern sculpture and poetry, which I appreciate but fundamentally don't really understand, I get food. I can look at a dish and imagine the...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 4:32 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (4)
Categories:  Food  
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Blue Sky series: Michael Lind's plan

Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how many...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 3:59 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (6)
Categories:  Blue sky series  
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Industrial farms, cont'd

Over at Grist, Tom Philpott takes me to task for a tossed-off post the other day about industrial farms. He's right that I shouldn't have endorsed Jay Rayner's post, which wasn't particularly tightly argued. But I was using it to...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 3:00 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (15)
Categories:  Food  
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Can Christine O'Donnell save the Republican Party?

Ross Douthat has some interesting thoughts on the opportunity Christine O'Donnell presents for Republicans: In the long run, though, O’Donnell’s victory — and the defeat that will almost certainly follow in November — might provide a salutary reality check...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 2:44 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
Categories:  2010 Midterms, 2012 Presidential  
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What I'd like to hear Obama say about the tax cuts

For all that the Republicans are being breathtakingly hypocritical in proposing the largest increase in the federal deficit in memory, President Obama and the Democrats are only being slightly less hypocritical by proposing a slightly smaller -- but still...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 2:05 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (42)
Categories:  Taxes  
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What does Fenty's defeat mean for Obama's education reforms?

Dana Goldstein thinks Barack Obama and Arne Duncan could learn a thing or two from the defeat of Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee: As antithetical as the Fenty/Rhee scorched earth PR strategy is to President Obama’s own calm and conciliatory...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 1:48 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
Categories:  Education  
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Lunch break

It's interesting to go back and watch this "NewsHour" report on Michelle Rhee from the halcyon days of 2007:...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 1:10 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (0)
 
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Did the economy doom Fenty?

This morning, I suggested that Adrian Fenty's horrible campaign -- he refused to even run polls -- implied that you could be bad enough at politics to overwhelm a fairly good record. But on Twitter, Ryan Avent disagreed. "Unemployment...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 12:41 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
Categories:  2010 Midterms  
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How Congress is making the rich richer in one graph

Annie Lowrey* catches a very nice graph from the Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee that compares tax rates on the rich to their share of the nation's income. As you can see, as their incomes have gone up, their...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 12:28 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (13)
Categories:  Charts and Graphs, Inequality  
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Yes, tax cuts increase the deficit

There are a couple of weird arguments that come up when you talk about tax cuts. One is that "tax cuts do not cause deficits. Spending does." This is pretty easy to test: If we cut taxes this year but...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 10:47 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (33)
Categories:  Budget, Taxes  
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Fenty's loss

If you were looking to disprove the view that campaigns are primarily about how well the economy is doing and whether objective conditions are getting better or worse, you couldn't do much better than Adrian Fenty's loss last night....

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 10:42 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (10)
 
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Tom Toles is worth a thousand words

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 10:40 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (1)
 
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Putting the $3.9 trillion extension of the Bush tax cuts in context

More needs to be done to put the numbers involved in extending the Bush tax cuts in context, so consider this: There is no policy that President Obama has passed or proposed that added as much to the deficit...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 9:26 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (38)
Categories:  Taxes  
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Wonkbook: The Tea Party takes over; the GOP's $3.9 trillion tax plan; small business bill moves

Voter rage! Anti-incumbent fever! A shocking upset! Ovide LaMontagne has an awesome name! But this is Wonkbook, so let's talk about the implications for policy. Sorry, sorry. The immediate impact is that the GOP became that much less likely...

By Ezra Klein  | September 15, 2010; 7:12 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (21)
Categories:  Wonkbook  
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Reconciliation

Recap: The Senate moved the small-business lending bill forward but failed on an important provision; Democrats want to play word games with the Bush tax cuts; and the two scariest graphs I've seen in a while. Elsewhere: 1) What's holding...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 6:25 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (3)
 
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Explaining 'the enthusiasm gap'

Joshua Tucker wonders how parties that took power atop excited majorities in one year go on to lose power because their voters don't turn out the next year: Maybe it is easier for opposition parties to “rally the faithful”...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 4:37 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (6)
Categories:  2010 Midterms  
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Blue Sky series: Heather Boushey's plan

Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how many...

By Heather Boushey  | September 14, 2010; 4:05 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (6)
Categories:  Blue sky series  
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Two graphs that should really scare us

Both of these come from the International Monetary Fund's new paper (pdf) on employment, which is graph-tastic. The first looks at the long-term effect unemployment has on the average male's long-term earnings. So a 25-year-old worker whose firm went under...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 2:58 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
Categories:  Charts and Graphs  
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The state of play on the Bush tax cuts

I'm not expecting any real action on the Bush tax cuts until the lame-duck session of Congress. But you are starting to see politicians stake out position between President Obama's preference of extending the middle-class tax cuts indefinitely while letting...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 1:56 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (23)
Categories:  Taxes  
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Small-business lending bill advances

Depressing as the 1099 fight was, there is good news out of the Senate today: The small-business lending bill passed the 60-vote hurdle and is now on its way to passage. The legislation includes a $30 billion lending fund, $12...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 1:31 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
 
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Senate fails small-business owners on 1099 reform

Two separate amendments to reform the 1099 reporting requirements in the health-care bill failed today. I imagine that sentence doesn't mean much to you. But it's a bad thing. The 1099 reporting requirement raises $17 billion in the health-care...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 1:26 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (51)
Categories:  Health Reform, Taxes  
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Lunch break

The magic of comics:...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 12:43 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (2)
 
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Community colleges cont'd

A reader writes in: My daughter has been enrolled in a local Community College for two years and plans on continuing to earn her degree by transferring. When she was in about 9th grade, we would talk colleges and where...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 11:32 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (17)
Categories:  Education  
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The conservative outrage machine

I've not written much about Dinesh D'Souza's latest cry for attention and book sales because, well, who wants to reward that kind of behavior? Though I do like imagining the pitch meeting: "So, Dinesh, having accused liberals of causing 9/11,...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 11:27 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (16)
Categories:  Books  
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Our not-so-jobless recovery?

Here's an interesting argument from Invictus: "Although we experienced the worst job-loss recession since the Great Depression, this has not been as job-less a recovery as many would have us believe. It is demonstrably better than the past two recessions...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 10:45 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (3)
Categories:  Economy  
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Democrats turn to meaningless word games

Greg Sargent reports that House Democrats want to rebrand the extension of Bush's middle-class tax cuts as "the Obama tax cuts for the middle class." Sigh. Whether you think this is a good idea, a bad idea or a totally...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 10:32 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (26)
Categories:  Democrats  
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Remember the community colleges

This community college dean was not pleased to open up his New York Times and read this four-part colloquy asking why colleges are so selective: How is someone at a community college supposed to read the question “why are colleges...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 9:23 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (3)
Categories:  Education  
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Wonkbook: GOP doubles down on Bush tax cuts; possible recess appointment for Warren; EPA vote

Republicans spent much of yesterday walking back John Boehner's conciliatory comments on the Bush tax cuts. Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP, in particular, made it clear that either everyone -- including the rich -- get their tax cuts,...

By Ezra Klein  | September 14, 2010; 6:31 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (14)
Categories:  Wonkbook  
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Reconciliation

Recap: A table that might prevent the next financial meltdown; a chart predicting Democratic House losses in the midterm; and what if growth had been shared equally between 1979 and 2006? Elsewhere: 1) So conservatives are now pro-Kenyan colonialism? 2)...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 6:10 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
 
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Douglas Elliott on Basel III: 'I am happy, and yes, you should be pleased.'

Since nothing juices traffic quite like blanket coverage of the capital requirements coming out of the Basel III negotiations, here's one more for you: Douglas Elliott, the current director of Brookings' Center on Federal Financial Institutions and a former investment...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 5:51 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (2)
Categories:  Financial Regulation, Interviews  
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Industrial farms are the future

Jay Rayner offers some real talk on food production: If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture, which take...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 4:13 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (25)
Categories:  Food  
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What if growth had been equal?

I spent my lunch break reading "Winner-Take-All Politics," and suggest you do the same. It's time well spent. I'll probably be doing a fair amount of blogging from this book over the next few days, but let's start with...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 3:31 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (14)
Categories:  Inequality  
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The Blue Sky Series: Mark Zandi's plan

Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 1:49 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (4)
Categories:  Blue sky series  
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The power of authority

From "The Secret Lives of Big Pharma's 'Thought Leaders' ": In the early 1970s, a group of medical researchers decided to study an unusual question. How would a medical audience respond to a lecture that was completely devoid of content,...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 1:24 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
 
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Lunch break

I do apologize if this clip makes your computer explode from adorable. (Via Aaron Carroll.)...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 1:00 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (1)
 
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On tax cuts, Democrats win, deficit loses

The White House was happy to hear John Boehner wave the white flag on the Bush tax cuts this weekend. "If the only option I have is to vote for those at [$250,000] and below, of course I'm going...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 12:05 PM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (78)
Categories:  Budget, Taxes  
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Monday NBER papers

"Beyond GDP? Welfare across Countries and Time," by Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow: We propose a simple summary statistic for a nation's flow of welfare, measured as a consumption equivalent, and compute its level and growth rate for...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 11:24 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (4)
Categories:  Economics  
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Will this table prevent the next financial crisis?

There it is. Basel III, in all its glory. The chart you're looking at is a summary of what international regulators are going to do to try and stop another financial crisis from happening. The numbers atop this post...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 11:05 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (7)
Categories:  Financial Regulation  
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Welcome back, Congress

Congress is back in session today, and it's got a lot on its agenda. A food safety bill, for instance. The Bush tax cuts. An infrastructure bank. Ratification of the START treaty. But as Brookings' Thomas Mann says in...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 10:38 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (1)
Categories:  Congress  
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The Kobe Bryant theory of inequality

Both Matthew Yglesias and Alex Tabbarok seem to think we disagree about the role of technology and inequality. We don't. As Tom Noah's series on inequality suggests, there are lots of questions when it comes to inequality. But what's...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 10:34 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
Categories:  Inequality  
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Ritholtz: The worst is behind us on housing

Barry Ritholtz, who some would say has been "bearish" on housing but who's also been right about it, thinks the worst is behind us: My basis for saying the worst is likely over are prices: We are off 33%...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 9:30 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (8)
Categories:  Housing Crisis  
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The midterm election in one graph

John Sides has compiled the House election forecasts from a variety of political scientists (and Nate Silver) and put them together on one chart. As you can see, most of them suggest that Democrats will lose the majority....

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 9:01 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (5)
Categories:  2010 Midterms  
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Wonkbook: Boehner buckles on Bush tax cuts; Surowiecki on why the stimulus is unpopular; Happy Basel III day!

For journalists, today marks the hardest day of financial reform: How do we get people to care about a bunch of international regulators calling themselves Basel III? But their agreement is, arguably, more consequential then the financial regulation bill...

By Ezra Klein  | September 13, 2010; 7:06 AM ET  |  Permalink  |  Comments (14)
Categories:  Wonkbook  
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