Ezra Klein

The favored parlor game of the political-economic complex right now is guessing who will replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The clear front-runner is Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen. But she’s by no means a sure thing. One important reason she’s not — and I don’t know another way to say […]

For the White House, immigration reform perfectly encapsulates the most frustrating reality of President Barack Obama’s second term: If it’s to be a success, Obama needs to stay out of the lawmaking process. That’s the message he’s gotten from Democratic and Republican legislators alike. In the New Yorker, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey […]

Chief justice of the U.S. is a pretty big job. You lead the Supreme Court conferences where cases are discussed and voted on. You preside over oral arguments. When in the majority, you decide who writes the opinion. You get a cool robe that you can decorate with gold stripes. Oh, and one more thing: […]

The zombies in the new film “World War Z” are too fast to be truly scary. That may be a sacrilegious point in some nerd circles, but it’s a key insight derived from epidemiology and, zombies aside, it has serious implications for global health. The rise of fast zombies — zombies that hunt like velociraptors […]

There are two main schools of thought on income inequality: The fatalists, who contend that rising inequality is the ineluctable result of a changing economy, and the redistributionists, who blame a skewed tax system and lethargic government. Perhaps it’s time to consider a third. The fatalist case rests on technology: As we replace human toil […]

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama relied on a standard applause line, a promise that his health-care plan would “lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year.” Cue cheers — or jeers if you were a health-policy expert. For them, his vow was ridiculous. There was no time frame attached […]

Power has devolved to the people. And the people hate it. In his book “Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics,” Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina considers this “the great irony” of American politics: that the more Americans participate in their political system, the angrier and more disillusioned they become. We have met […]

There was a time when all anyone in Washington wanted to talk about was “bending the health-care cost curve.” Forget covering the uninsured — the ultimate test of the Affordable Care Act would be the trajectory of health-care costs. But Washington has a short memory. That whole “curve” thing was years ago. Meanwhile, we’ve turned […]

Put aside the politics, and the question of who-knew-what-when. There are two policy problems highlighted by the controversies at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice. The first is the growth of 501(c)(4) groups into vehicles for anonymous and unlimited political spending. The second is the Barack Obama administration’s overzealous prosecution of leaks. […]

Talk to people in Oregon about health care for long and eventually you will be asked something like this: “You’ve heard the air conditioner story, right?” In this case, it’s John McConnell, a health economist at Oregon Health and Science University, doing the asking. As it turns out, I have heard the story; it’s one […]