A debate is raging in the blogosphere about this graph, which shows that “Generally speaking, the wealthier a student’s family is, the higher the SAT score.” Alex Tabarrok gets us up to speed on the debate thus far: Greg Mankiw pointed out that the effect is unlikely to be purely causal because there may be [...]

General David Petraeus made a funny at the expense of the Air Force in his remarks at the Marine Corps Association Foundation dinner last month: Come to think of it, in fact another bedrock element of the Marine Corps is unquestionably having the best recruiting ads on television. [Laughter] But this concept is not just [...]

Matt Yglesias notes that bloggers and others who write for the Web lack a luxury of those who write for print: “nobody has any idea who’s reading them.”  Whereas there are detailed metrics about pageviews on the Web, all print has to go on is circulation figures.  So they can blithely assume that their long [...]

A bit over a year ago, Brad DeLong (who is a doctor but not a medical doctor) proposed “An Unrealistic, Impractical, Utopian Plan for Dealing with the Health Care Opportunity,” the crux of which is: 20% Deductible/Out of Pocket Cap: The IRS snarfs 20% of your family economic income. 5% of it is an increase [...]

Two blogging conventions, Netroots Nation (the successor to Daily Kos) and RightOnline, are being held in Pittsburgh this week.  As Timothy McNulty reports for the Post-Gazette, they’re different in ways other than politics. The RightOnline conference starting tomorrow morning at the Sheraton Station Square will have about a quarter of the 2,000 attendees at the [...]

The Obama Administration is pushing an 8-pronged list of “Health Insurance Consumer Protections.” No Discrimination for Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance companies will be prohibited from refusing you coverage because of your medical history. No Exorbitant Out-of-Pocket Expenses, Deductibles or Co-Pays Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for [...]

Matt Yglesias notes that Shanghai has a long-term plan for expanding their subway system and laments that we’re not so forward thinking here in America. What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, [...]

Matt Yglesias cites a 15-year-old essay by Hendrick Hertzberg arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional: It’s true that the framers did not specify that the Senate would do its normal business by simple majority vote, but that’s because it didn’t occur to them that they had to specify it, any more than it occurred to [...]

Continuing a long-running theme at his blog, Matt Yglesias laments that Senators from small states wield so much power.  The latest fuel is a NYT feature on six moderates who are supposedly the linchpins to putting together a bipartisan health care deal and who routinely hash out the details of same over snacks. [V]ast power [...]

Tim Harwood looks at a recent National Center of Education Statistics report [PDF] titled “Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.”  In particular, he highlights the fact that “Black students at the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have consistently [...]

Matt Yglesias dashed off a quick tab dump post before calling it a night. It began, “It must take a wide Latina indeed to restrain herself from slugging some of these guys.” Commenters are wondering if Matt is suggesting that soon-to-be Justice Sonia Sotomayor is fat. I’m reminded of an infamous convocation speech a decade [...]

Matt Yglesias has an interesting suggestion for a preachy movie revival: [W]hat the new rebooted Trek really needs is a re-do of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home but dealing with a more contemporary environmental threat than the need to save humpback whales from extinction. For example, The Enterprise could travel back in time to [...]

Having apparently learned nothing from its TimesSelect debacle wherein, by charging a nominal fee to read its opinion columnists, the NYT ensured no one read said columns much less linked to them, the paper is floating a trial balloon of charging $5 a month to read its online edition. Michael Crowley is enthusiastic: Given that [...]

Surprisingly few bloggers of the bloggers I read are writing about GM’s emergence from bankruptcy in a mere 40 days through a rather unorthodox process.  The background: AP: General Motors completed an unusually quick exit from bankruptcy protection on Friday with ambitions of making money and building cars people are eager to buy. Once the [...]

Robert Farley cites testimony by SECDEF Bob Gates and JCS Chair Mike Mullen wherein they don’t dismiss entirely the idea that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter might be the last manned fighter the U.S. military ever builds. He thinks this a logical evolution: [T]here are currently jobs that manned warplanes can do that drones can’t [...]

Matt Yglesias noticed the same thing I did:  This past three-day weekend seemed more relaxing than usual.  His explanation is plausible: I’ve really enjoyed this rare Friday-off three day weekend. I think it’s been a lot more fun than your traditional Monday-off three dayer. I think it’s the difference between a weekend that psychologically feels [...]

I agree with Matt Yglesias that “it’s a bit ugly to talk politics in the wake of a tragedy” but, like him, I will nonetheless point to a couple of interesting, related debates that have been sparked by yesterday’s crash on DC’s Metrorail system Red Line. This report, naturally, is causing some finger pointing: The [...]

With new polls out showing that support for President Obama’s policies declining rapidly, Dave Weigel weighs in to remind us that Obama’s doing better than his predecessors at comparable periods. Matt Yglesias helpfully puts the data into a handy dandy chart. Even aside from the fact that this is looking at Obama’s topline approval — [...]

Matt Yglesias takes ESPN’s Bill Simmons to task for arguing that Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan “might compare statistically and stylistically, but Jordan could command a room of 10 people or 20,000 and get the exact same reaction: Every set of eyes trained on him for as long as he was there. His personality, his [...]

Matt Yglesias has discovered the facts that 1) each state gets two Senators and 2) some states are bigger than others, a condition that has obtained since the inception of our current system in 1789.  There was, as some may recall having read, this thing called the Great Compromise whereby delegates representing sovereign states under [...]

Matt Yglesias snarks, Watching the Senator from Alabama’s press conference, I’m comforted by the fact that whatever our ideological disagreements this is a man who’s made it in life without any preferential treatment. One hundred percent meritocracy in action. America is a beautiful place. Presumably, no one makes it to high office without some sort [...]

USA Today reports on a proposal circulating in the Senate Finance Committee to fund health care through sin taxes on booze. Beer taxes would go up by 48 cents a six-pack, wine taxes would rise by 49 cents per bottle, and the tax on hard liquor would increase by 40 cents per fifth. Proceeds from [...]

Matt Yglesias converted a major OMB spreadsheet from Microsoft Excel format into Google Docs as a service to his users. It’s a small thing, but I do think it’s true that one thing the government could be doing to reduce monopoly power that doesn’t involve the heavy hand of lawsuits would be to push back [...]

My New Atlanticist essay “Australia Prepares for U.S. Decline” discusses a recent Aussie white paper that is generating much discussion in the foreign policy wonkosphere.  Basically, they see a rapidly rising China and a United States that’s overstretched with other commitments and could therefore reduce our commitments to the Asia-Pacific region.  Hence, they’re planning for [...]

The new “Star Trek” prequel is out.   The reviews are mixed but Jar-Jar Binks is not featured, guaranteeing that it’ll be better than the first “Star Wars” prequel. What’s interesting is how well the franchise has endured and how wide-ranging its appeal remains.  The show (since dubbed “The Original Series” or “TOS” by the fanbase) [...]

UCSB political scientist Aaron Belkins‘ HuffPo piece “Obama To Fire His First Gay Arabic Linguist” has drawn quite a bit of blogospheric attention. Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about [...]

Jim Romenesko summarizes a CJR editorial: Walter Pincus points out that the Washington Post won nineteen Pulitzers in the last decade, but lost more than 120,000 readers in that time. “Why? My answer, unpopular among my colleagues, is that while many of these longer efforts were worthwhile, they took up space and resources that could [...]

The Washington Post company continues its consolidation of the media universe with the hire of Ezra Klein.   Politico’s Michael Calderone breaks the news: The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy, is heading to the Washington Post. Rumors about Klein’s upcoming move spread on Wednesday night during a reception [...]

Matt Yglesias justifiably has some fun with the news that twice divorced, thrice married Newt Gingrich is charging that “The Democratic Party has been the active instrument of breaking down traditional marriage.”  And one can’t blame him for being amused that twice divorced, thrice married Rudy Giuliani is championing traditional marriage as a cornerstone of [...]

Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent “How to save the dying newspaper industry” meme that’s been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere. He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson (“How to Save Your Newspaper”) that advocates a micropayment system.  While pretty [...]

People under a certain age have stopped using voice mail, Jill Colvin reports for NYT. When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. Hollywood screenwriters incorporated it into plotlines: Distraught heroine comes home, sees blinking [...]

Responding to a reader suggestion that blogger’s word counts be restricted by government (a rather apples-meet-oranges response to a post suggesting CEO pay be capped) Matt Yglesias only wishes it were so. Personally, I would love a legal cap on the number of words a blogger is allowed to produce per day. I’m privileged to [...]

There’s a consensus emerging among the bloggers I read that taxing AIG bonuses, in addition to being Constitutionally questionable, is just a really bad idea.   Let’s leave aside the conservative die-hards and libertarian types, who might be expected to think that, and concentrate on those on the leeward side of center. Nate Silver offers some [...]

Robert Farley thinks the United States spends far too much on defense. Absent supplementals, the United States currently runs a defense budget of just over half a trillion dollars, a number which does not include defense-related spending in other departments. By the kindest calculations, this means that the U.S. spends roughly four to six times [...]

Matt Yglesias, responding to my statement yesterday that “We’ll always have a strong ‘conservative’ movement. It’s just that Ronald Reagan and Alex P. Keaton wouldn’t quite recognize it,” one-ups me and posits that “American politics in the future will mostly be dominated by a center-right political coalition just as it always has.” While he’s riding [...]

Chris Cillizza‘s report that the Obama campaign apparatus is being “activated” by the Obama administration gets A1 treatment in today’s WaPo: President Obama will kick off an all-out grass-roots effort today urging Congress to pass his $3.55 trillion budget, activating the extensive campaign apparatus he built during his successful 2008 candidacy for the first time [...]

Matt Yglesias challenges Lisa Schiffren‘s assertion that “The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians).” Matt counters, reasonably enough, that guys who move furniture for a [...]

Tyler Cowen passes along a “study” by Daniel Klein and Jason Briggeman which “finds” that conservative magazines are anti-liberty: Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty [...]

In a post Robert Prather dubs “A good primer on why I oppose DC statehood,” Matt Yglesias expresses his surprise that Democrats, who would demonstrably benefit from adding two more of their own to the Senate and another to the House, aren’t more wildly enthusiastic. But the striking thing is not how strong Republican opposition [...]

Matt Yglesias observes that, “The idea that Gran Torino is a conservative movie is, meanwhile, bizarre. In its main plot arc it’s very clearly a subversion of Dirty Harry-style right-wing vigilante fantasies.” I fully agree with the first sentence of Matt’s quote above but for a totally different reason:  There’s no such thing as a [...]

Matt Yglesias catches NBC’s David Gregory saying “it isn’t just the fat cats, it’s you and me” when, in reality, Gregory is almost certainly a fat cat. And I think Matt’s exactly right about why that happens: people tend to think their reality is “normal” and define poor and rich as those significantly below or [...]

People in Matt Yglesias‘ neighborhood have petitioned to increase the amount of time pedestrians get to cross New York Avenue at 5th St. NW from 20 to 45 seconds and they’ve been rejected.  The rationale: DDOT is concerned that changing the walk time at this intersection may negatively impact pedestrian safety at this intersection further, [...]

Matt Yglesias has a reply to Amar Bhide’s article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Amar Bhide, WSJ Edit Page, Embrace Regular Recurrence of Massive Recessions”. The problem is that Amar Bhide does not advocate doing nothing. Perhaps Yglesias didn’t read to the entire article, but for those who did they will find the following [...]

Kevin Drum agrees with Duncan Black that it’s fine for Republicans to oppose Barack Obama and the Democrats. He adds, though, that “The filibuster was never intended to become a routine requirement that all legislation needs 60% of the vote in the Senate to pass. But that’s what it’s become. It’s time for reform.” Steve [...]

Matt Yglesias discovers that some people make a whole lot of money and stumbles on a novel idea. Why not more brackets with slightly higher rates at $450,000 and $550,000 and $650,000 and so on and so forth up the spectrum? People who start earning this kind of big-time CEO money would, I think, almost [...]

Matt Yglesias explains why public transit should be free through an analogy: Say there’s no road between Washington, DC and Frederick, Maryland. You can go from the one place to the other, but it involves going way out of your way even though it could be a pretty quick trip on a direct road. What [...]

Yesterday morning’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week” by new GOP chair Michael Steele is causing some consternation. This passage in particular: STEELE: What this administration is talking about is making work. It is creating work. STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s a job. STEELE: No, it’s not a job. A job is something that — that a business [...]

Some on the left are under the impression that the Bush administration failed to provide stimulus to get us out of the current economic mess, so we therefore need even more stimulus now. Matt Yglesias:  “When you see conservative complaining that the stimulus bill is too expensive and won’t be fast-acting enough, keep in mind [...]

Matt Yglesias has returned from vacation in Spain where “they have this interesting political system (”democracy”) wherein if your party loses the election, the other party gets to make policy until they lose an election.” Well . . . it’s a wee bit more complicated than that.  Leaving aside that the country was run by [...]

In the discussion section of Steve Verdon’s Obama the Fear Monger post, commentor Drew and I had a brief debate about the possibility of using TARP funds to create new banks rather than try to rescue old ones.  In today’s Wall Street Journal, Paul Romer of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research makes this [...]