Friday, October 08, 2010

Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post has become one of my favorite reads. Here are a few recent articles,

Austan Goolsbee on the Bush tax cuts, a payroll-tax holiday and what he'd do with $700 billion.

Will America come to envy Japan's lost decade?. He quotes Goldman Sachs's Jan Hatzius and Paul Krugman and concludes, "So the political system is biased toward caution, which isn't a particularly good bias to have amid a financial crisis that requires massive, unconventional economic policy interventions. But because the policies were too cautious, they don't solve the problem, and that discredits them, which leaves the government without tools and the economy in tatters. It's a bit like taking too few antibiotics, noticing that you're still sick, and swearing off antibiotics altogether."

He then quotes Martin Feldstein on the stimulus " As Feldstein says, the stimulus was too small, and the proper argument now is over how to do more of it, not whether we should do more of it -- or, even worse, whether we should have done it at all."

He then pointed to this great graphic, Why it doesn't feel like a recovery by Neil Irwin in the Washington Post. I can't embed it so visit the article.

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