It’s the 5% versus the 1% moreso than the 99% against the 1%.

Making sure millionaires pay more tax than their secretary isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Some DC based hipsters want to know why America doesn’t have good pubs like in London. It turns out, they’re everywhere.

An odd union contract creates powerful incentives against making escalators at subway stations in the nation’s capital work.

The Tea Party movement and the populist backlash against DC mayor Adrian Fenty are a sign that things are changing so fast that a lot of people simply can’t adjust.

If lawyers and MBAs don’t understand their mortgage documents, what chance do the rest of us have?

Megan McArdle cites an academic article someone disagrees with, proving she’s a dishonest hack.

Congrats to Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman, who married yesterday. Megan Jennifer McArdle and Peter William Lindeberg Suderman were married Saturday at the Cosmos Club in Washington. The Rev. William R. Ballance, a Lutheran minister, officiated. The bride, 37, will keep her name. She is the business and economics editor of The Atlantic in Washington. [...]

Two people who know more about finances than I ever will offer retirement savings advice that I’ll not be following. Reuters blogger Felix Samon says (“Why people invest in stocks“) avoid the stock market like a plague. For one thing, you have no good reason to expect an equity premium going forwards, and if there [...]

Atlantic business and economics editor Megan McArdle wonders, “Why Does Academia Treat Its Workforce So Badly?” This might seem a ridiculous question, given that most people think professors are overpaid, underworked prima donnas who can never be fired.  But she cites Peter D.G. Brown‘s recent Inside Higher Ed piece explaining that, if it was ever [...]

UPDATE:  WE’RE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES.  WE HOPE TO START THE SHOW AT 6. A special Thursday episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. Dave Schuler and I will be joined by special guest Megan McArdle, the business and economics editor of The Atlantic and the world’s tallest [...]

While not at all pleased by the outcome of the year-long sausage making extravaganza that gave us a health care reform bill that virtually no one likes, I’m much closer in agreement Steven Taylor than with Megan McArdle over what it all means for the system. Do we, as Megan suggested at the apex of [...]

So, the health care reform was passed last night owing to a bizarre compromise is which Bart Stupak persuaded President Obama to issue a meaningless executive order proclaiming that the law passed by both Houses of Congress says what Stupak has spent months pointing out it doesn’t say. The basic facts, from NYT: With the [...]

Since hiring Andrew Sullivan and a slew of other already-established bloggers a couple years back, the Atlantic Monthly website has gone through quite a few design changes.  But last week’s total reorganization of the site into a series of channels, subsuming all the blogs except Andrew’s into what amounts to collections of links to archives, [...]

The world’s tallest female econoblogger, Megan McArdle, is experiencing her first major DC snowstorm and is, shall we say, not impressed. You have never seen a city as completely incompetent at dealing with snow as Washington DC. I mean, two feet of snow is inconvenient anywhere.  But in DC, only the main streets have been [...]

One refrain we’ve heard lots of since the 9/11 attacks, with an uptick every time there’s a new incidents, is that the United States should get serious about airport security and be more like the Israelis. FP’s Annie Lowrey recounts a personal trip through the security at Ben Gurion. Once inside, a team of pleasant [...]

In regards the current internecine Democratic fight over the health care compromise, Megan McArdle argues that many people are simply naive about as to how the negotiation process operates: This bill is, at this point, hideously unpopular.  I’m pretty sure you’ve got a bunch of senators who would really, really love not to vote for [...]

Megan McArdle’s annual Holiday Gift Guide: Kitchen Edition is useful and entertaining as ever. I do most almost all the cooking in the family but I can get by with far fewer gadgets as most of my recipes involve large chunks of meat and some vegetables and/or starches.  I’d add a decent iron skillet to [...]

Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle are among those recommending Saturday Night Live‘s opening sketch parodying a joint press conference with President Obama and Chinese President Hu. Drezner quips that the sketch manages to convey the nature of the relationship much more succinctly than his own 40-page academic treatise. Note that, although it appears that President [...]

Megan McArdle points me to this amusing video about which  Gizmodo’s John Herrmann gushes, “I’ve read the articles, watched the instructional videos, and gotten an invite, but nothing—nothing—has done more to explain to me how this mind-melting Internet Thing works than Pulp Fiction, spectacularly adapted for Google Wave. (Warning: Tarantino language ahead)” It’s an entertaining [...]

Mickey Kaus noted the other day that the UAW, which owns large stakes in both GM and Chrysler without paying a cent thanks to their support for the election of President Obama, is cutting their own companies a break and sticking it to Ford. I knew they’d find a way to punish Ford: The new UAW [...]

A man carrying an anti-abortion sign was murdered this morning. A well-known anti-abortion activist was shot multiple times and killed Friday morning in front of a Michigan high school and another man was shot and killed just miles away in what police are investigating as related incidents. Michigan State Police have taken a suspect into [...]

Megan McArdle asserts that there are lunatic fringes on both sides of the aisle and her commenters go on to demonstrate the validity of that assertion. I would take some exception, though, to her contention that “Ohio voting machine conspiracists” were “not anything like the mainstream of the Democratic party.”  I call your attention the [...]

Wikipedia is implementing a new policy requiring that changes to articles about living people be approved by moderators before going live, essentially abandoning the wiki model. The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. [...]

Luysii points to CDC data showing that American mortality rates are dropping year after year while we simultantaneously get fatter and fatter. S/he points to several possibilities: #1: More people are exercising than they used to. How many joggers and walkers did you see on the streets 20, 30 years ago? #2: Fewer people are [...]

Andrew Sullivan: The survival of my own marriage is entirely in the hands of the federal government. I have no right to stay in my own home with my own husband – just the government’s permission until they choose to revoke it. Gays do not have core constitutional rights in America. They have no right [...]

Megan McArdle reports that she has had a fourth bicycle stolen since moving to DC, all of them locked, all of them at her home, the most recent inside a stockade fence.  In frustration, she observes, “I think I’m done with bike commuting. I’d rather just hand out $100 bills to random people on the [...]

Via Megan McArdle, I see that President Obama told a woman whose now-105-year-old mother got a pacemaker five years ago that, under Obamacare, we might just give old ladies a pill: Megan observes, “I don’t know that this is going to hurt the image of healthcare reform.  But it probably isn’t going to help.”  That [...]

Reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Megan McArdle wonders why the space program lost its momentum.  Jim Henley reckons it’s because “space travel is expensive, dangerous, unprofitable and (medically, biologically) kind of” problematic. I’m old enough to have been alive for the moon walk but too young to remember [...]

Hearty congrats to the world’s tallest female econoblogger and Reason‘s newest Koch fellow, who, I have it on good Twittority, are engaged to be married after dating slightly less than a year. Rumors that Peter was guilted into making an honest woman of Megan by Stacy McCain are completely unfounded. UPDATE: A picture speaks 1000 [...]

Megan McArdle, reporting from an annual gabfest in Aspen: The questions for [Austan] Goolsbee are much more hostile than they were last year.  I don’t know whether to attribute this to the economy, or the fact that the disadvantages of Obama’s policies are now apparent.  All policies sound better when they’re in white paper, and [...]

As President Obama settles into his fifth month in office, his personal popularity remains high but his job approval is slipping drastically, according to a new NYT/CBS News poll. A substantial majority of Americans say President Obama has not developed a strategy to deal with the budget deficit, according to the latest New York Times/CBS [...]

Megan McArdle has two excellent posts this morning that, while seemingly unrelated, aren’t.  First, she wonders “Why Doesn’t the Market Produce Non-Smoking Bars?” This seems like a market failure.  You can explain it through preference asymmetry and the profitability of various customer classes:  heavy drinkers are more likely to also be heavy smokers, and they [...]

There’s been a meme circulating the Internets the last couple of days that the 789 Chrysler dealerships that were suddenly closed were (1) hand selected by Barack Obama’s “car czar” and (2) overwhelmingly owned by Republican donors. Doug Ross, who dubs it “dealergate,” seems to have been the chief initiator of the argument.  He cites [...]

Jon Henke Twitters: “The California referendum proves that what voters want to spend is not well-connected with what voters are willing to pay.” Quite right.  Californian Kevin Drum takes as a given that his state is “broken” but sees no solution in sight.  While he’s in favor of Governor Schwarzenegger’s idea of a constitutional convention [...]

Megan has a very good post on the subject. Perhaps predictibly, someone showed up in the comments to my post on Medicare and Social Security to argue that liberal analysts have very serious plans to cut Medicare’s costs, which is why we need universal coverage, so that we can implement those very serious plans. I [...]

Megan McArdle starts off a post by summarizing a column: James Surowiecki has a very interesting column arguing that this bubble was different because unlike the earlier banking booms, there was no point to the wild spending.  The bubble didn’t bring us railroads and electrification; it brought us . . . houses.  Lots and lots [...]

Reacting to a report buttressing the obvious fact that “very small cars generally can’t protect people in crashes as well as bigger, heavier models,” an angry Michael O’Hare‘s wonders “why is oversizing and up-weighting not the behavior associated with an increase in deaths on the highway? Why is the ‘standard’ car the fat, thirsty, heavy [...]

Responding to Kevin Drum‘s observation that no-phosphate dishwashing detergent suddenly became possible when regulation demanded it, proving that theretofore “The industry just didn’t feel like doing it,” Megan McArdle retorts, “when I look back at almost every ‘environmentally friendly’ alternative product I’ve seen being widely touted as a cost-free way to lower our footprint, held [...]

Megan McArdle calls for an extension of Godwin’s Law that would put an end to “using the word fascist to apply to the current, or indeed previous, administration.” How is this helpful?  Has clarifying the distinction between fascism and socialism really added to most peoples’ understanding of what the Obama administration is doing?  All this [...]

“I think the worst thing we have going for us right now isn’t presidential inexperience but that we now have two opposition parties.  I think it was Megan McArdle who pointed out that members of the party in power are smug and arrogant while members of the party out of power are insane.  Now we [...]

Responding to understandable public outrage, President Obama is vowing to figure out a way to get back the money AIG paid to the people who ran the company into the ground. President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of “recklessness and greed” and said he intends [...]

TigerHawk wants to know why, if it’s a good idea to cap the salaries of CEOs of companies getting federal bailouts at $500,000 why we shouldn’t do that with universities that get federal funding? Megan McArdle isn’t persuaded by the obvious answer: one is asking to be rescued by the taxpayer and the other is [...]

Megan McArdle is angry to the point of thinking profane thoughts over the idea that Bernie Madoff transferred some $69 million in assets to his wife’s name to shelter them from the Feds.  She, quite reasonably, feels that “those investors certainly deserve it better than Ruth Madoff, who has been living high off of ill-gotten [...]

Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about Megan McArdle’s relationship with Peter Suderman has now been synthesized for your reading pleasure in one convenient post.  I wish much happiness to them both. For the record, I had always operated under the presumption that what Megan — and, for that matter, Peter [...]

After months of sounding the alarm bell, President Obama is finally talking up the economy. President Obama told Americans to take a look at investing in the stock market this afternoon, a remarkable utterance for an American president, especially as the Dow Jones Industrial Average proceeds on its course Southward. “What you’re now seeing is [...]

College students increasingly expect to be rewarded for trying hard, Max Roosevelt claims in NYT: “Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.” He attributes those complaints to his students’ [...]

One of the trends I noted and commented on during the campaign was the insidious suggestion that one could only oppose Barack Obama’s election as president out of racism.   Now, it seems, we’re seeing the evolution of that theme:  racism must be behind any opposition to President Obama’s policy aims. Megan McArdle defends [here and [...]

Megan McArdle: Let’s say that TARP proponents are right and that some program to pump a great deal of money into banks is better than just letting them fail. It does not then therefore follow, as night to day, that this package–or any politically feasible package–is better than nothing. It can be true that Ideal>0 [...]

Greg Mankiw notes that with the new President taking office as well as having control of both chambers of Congress with wide margins that it is time to switch. What kind of switch is he referring too? Jane’s Law: The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party [...]