Ezra Klein

The theme of Ted Cruz’s filibuster this week was “Make D.C. Listen.” But Cruz himself doesn’t listen; he talks. And talks. And talks. It’s no wonder the Texas senator can’t hear what the public is actually saying. A recent CNBC poll asked whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be defunded. By 44 […]

Larry Summers’s campaign to replace Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke wasn’t doomed by any of the typical doubts about a potential Fed chief. Senate Democrats weren’t worried that Summers was too tolerant of inflation or insufficiently committed to quantitative easing. In fact, they weren’t worried about his opinions on monetary policy at all. Summers fell […]

The original rationale for the Iraq War was that the U.S. wasn’t safe so long as Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. It quickly became clear that wasn’t enough to justify an invasion. So other arguments were trotted out — each suggesting more ambitious goals, and thus requiring more expansive means, than the last. […]

The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 Syrians have died since the country’s civil war began in March 2011. More die every day. But the U.S. is not considering military action to save them. The strikes that the Barack Obama administration favors, and that Congress is now debating, have a more limited purpose: to […]

At this point, Larry Summers isn’t just the favorite for Federal Reserve chairman. He’s the overwhelming favorite. Unless something truly unexpected shows up in the vetting process (a paid toast at Bashar al-Assad’s birthday party, for example) or the administration comes to believe Senate Democrats will revolt against a Summers nomination, he’s going to get […]

Health care and education pose the same basic threat to the economy: How do you keep costs down for a product that consumers must purchase? Saying “no,” after all, is how consumers typically restrain costs. If Best Buy Co. wants to charge you too much for a television, you can walk out. You might want […]

Health insurance isn’t like other forms of insurance. It’s not protection against the unlikely; it’s insulation against the inevitable. Most people never use their fire insurance. Almost everyone uses their health insurance. Eventually. The key is that not everyone uses their health insurance at the same time, or with the same frequency. Sick people use […]

Everything you know about immigration, particularly unauthorized immigration, is wrong. So says Princeton University’s Doug Massey, anyway. Massey is one of the nation’s preeminent immigration scholars. And he thinks we’ve wasted a whole lot of money on immigration policy and are about to waste a whole lot more. Massey slices the history of Mexico-to-U.S. migration […]

The strangest part of the increasingly bitter shadow campaign for chairman of the Federal Reserve is that the contest is not really about monetary policy. It’s about financial regulation. The two leading candidates for the job are Janet Yellen, the current vice chairman of the Fed, and Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and an […]

On Jan. 1, 2014, the federal government will begin subsidizing millions of people’s health insurance purchases through Obamacare. “At that point,” warned Byron York, an influential conservative columnist with the Washington Examiner, “the Republican mantra of total repeal will become obsolete.” Three years after the law passed, one year after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld […]