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Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

1 Jun

So I sat down with this guy last week to talk about winning over skeptical voters, the things he didn't say when he was president, the mistakes in the ACA and the stimulus, aliens, what humans will be judged for in 100 years, and more.

Some highlights: nytimes.com/2021/06/01/opi…

Here’s Obama on the central paradox of his presidency:

He accomplishes this remarkable act of persuasion, but it opens the door to the Tea Party, to Sarah Palin, to Donald Trump — and so he leaves behind a politics that often seems post-persuasion, more hostile to pluralism:

One lesson some on the left have taken from the aftermath of Obama’s presidency is you can’t tiptoe around America’s worst impulses. You need a politics of confrontation, not of uncomfortable coalitions.

Here’s Obama on that tension:

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Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

21 May

Violent crime is spiking. Homicides in cities were up by 25-40 percent in 2020, the largest single-year increase since 1960. And 2021 isn’t looking any better.

This is a crisis on its own terms. But it’s also a crisis for the broader liberal project in two downstream ways.

@patrick_sharkey

First, violent crimes supercharges inequality. Families who can flee, do. Business close or never open. Banks won’t make loans. Property values plummet. Children are traumatized, with lifelong impacts on stress and cognition.

(@patrick_sharkey's work is great on this.)

Second, fear of violence undermines liberal politics. Just look at America post-9/11. Or after the crime surges of the 70s and 80s and 90s — strongmen politicians win, punitive responses like mass incarceration and warrior policing rise, social trust collapses.

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Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

19 May

This is completely insane. The FBI catfished a suicidally depressed pizza delivery guy. The agent catfishing him repeatedly tried to get him to commit a terrorist attack. He repeatedly talked her out of it. So they arrested him on gun possession. amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/29…

The judge gave him an unusually long sentence because of past homicidal fantasies he’d admitted to (or made up, who knows?) in his conversations, even though when the FBI agent tried to convince him to make them realities, he tried to talk her out of hurting other people.

So basically the FBI was looking for possible terrorists, found a guy who was committed - even under duress, even when mentally unstable and lonely and trying to impress a woman - to talking possible terrorists out of terrorist acts, and they arrested him. It’s lunacy.

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Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

14 May

@AgnesCallard

Everything @AgnesCallard says in this podcast is interesting. Like here she is just casually reversing the normal story of what politics is for, and what society is designed to teach us. No big deal. nytimes.com//2021/05/14/po…

And why parenting should actually be called "childing — all our language suggests the parent is in control, and setting the path, but really children are:

And what a leftwing version of Jordan Peterson would look like:

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Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

11 May

My favorite podcasts are the ones where I find myself struggling with the book, or the guest, I'm talking to. This is one of those.

I think Michael Lewis is asking exactly the right questions. I'm not sure the answers his sources give him were workable. nytimes.com/2021/05/11/opi…

This gets at something I've been reporting on, and thinking about, a lot: What are the constraints the public places on "public health"?

Regulators overstate them. Critics of regulators often understate them. And there's huge geographic variance -- and viruses exploit that.

If you believe America is culturally resistant to some pandemic best practices — and I do, at least at the level Lewis's sources are calling for — could we invest in and deploy preventive technologies that would let us balance liberty and health better?

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Ezra Klein

@ezraklein

5 May

@jonathanchait

I liked this @jonathanchait piece on how the Congress's rules force the Congressional Budget Office to ignore the revenue from better IRS enforcement. But I'm also always caught on one thing here: nymag.com/intelligencer/…

As EVERYONE AT THE CBO WILL TELL YOU, they do not hold any ultimate power. They release reports. The reports are important exactly to the extent Congress listens to them. And this doesn't strike me as an example of a case where the CBO is the powerful actor.

Congress often ignores these reports. Lots of Republicans pretended to believe, or actually believed, the Trump tax cuts would pay for themselves.

Or Congress ignores the rule to offset spending. The Rescue Plan wasn't paid for, and the Jobs Plan pays for itself over 15 years.

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