Ezra Klein

Can small money overwhelm big money? Faced with a hostile Supreme Court and a gridlocked Congress offering little chance of passing legislation, today’s campaign-finance reformers sure hope so. The notion is alluring. Online fundraising has made it easy to collect large sums in small increments from thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. […]

Right there on Page 40, in the “Munchies” section, nestled between “pretzels” and “twelve (12) Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups,” is a parenthetical alert so adamant you can’t miss it: “M&M’s,” the text reads, “(WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” This is the famed rider to Van Halen’s 1982 concert contract. In a sentence fragment that would […]

After John Boehner was elected leader of the House Republicans in 2006, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked him what was, at the time, an obvious question: “Medicare prescription drug benefit,” Wallace said. “How do you think it’s working?” This might have been a moment for Boehner to brag about one of the Republican Party’s […]

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s team became famous for submitting almost everything they did to rigorous A/B testing. Staff members would send different versions of a message to small groups of randomly selected supporters, determine which produced the best response and then disseminate the winning appeal to the audience at large. The campaign […]

The season premiere of “Mad Men” ended with Don Draper staring at the front page of the New York Times from Jan. 1, 1968. “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year,” reads the headline. (The Times story, by Murray Schumach, is real; you can read it here.) As in “Mad Men,” a sense of dread […]

Is Washington likely to break up the country’s biggest banks? No, not right now. But perhaps soon. Political momentum for dismantling them has been, in recent weeks, overstated. That unanimous vote in the Senate for a budget amendment critical of big banks? It was a nonbinding amendment to end “too-big-to-fail subsidies.” As it happens, there […]

President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act celebrated its third birthday last weekend. This particular anniversary was a big deal, because it was often unclear whether the law would reach it. In the first place, it was imperiled by the Supreme Court; in the second, by Republicans’ promise to kill it if they […]

I supported the Iraq War, and I’m sorry. I have my excuses, of course. I was a college student, young and dumb. I thought that if U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell and former President Bill Clinton and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair all thought it was necessary, then that […]

This week marks the beginning of the U.S. budget season. Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin will present the budget for House Republicans. Senator Patty Murray of Washington will, for the first time since 2009, present a budget on behalf of Senate Democrats. In a few weeks, the Barack Obama administration will publish its own budget. […]

There are two main problems with sequestration. The first is that the $1.1 trillion in budget cuts happen in an idiotic, across-the-board fashion. Think farm subsidies are less valuable than medical research, and thus should take a bigger cut? Too bad. Sequestration is too dumb to tell the difference. The second is that sequestration slams […]