The best sentences we read today

-- "A multimillionaire president nominated a billionaire who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his campaigns, and he sent her to be confirmed by the millionaires' club that is the U.S. Senate." Read full article >>

These 31 charts will destroy your faith in humanity

Earlier this week, Rob Wile of Business Insider posted his graph-heavy opus: "31 Charts That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity." Naturally, we here at Wonkblog were all eager to see the results. But we'd quibble a bit with Wile's interpretations of the data. His charts all struck us as _horrible _news. So we're re-analyzing them here with the proper, gloom-heavy spin: Read full article >>

Everything you know about employers and Obamacare is wrong

_Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff's regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system, is being written by Ezra Klein today. Sarah, unfortunately, is doing some firsthand reporting on America's dental system. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and

Two ways immigration reform could succeed and three ways it could fail

Earlier this week, the Senate immigration bill passed the Judiciary Committee easily, by a 13-5 vote, with three Republican supporters. And odds are looking good on the Senate floor. If Democrats stay unified in favor of the bill (a big if), and if those three Republicans and the two members of the Gang of Eight who are not on the committee back it on the floor, that's 60 votes in favor, enough

We're delaying Wonkblog book club a week. Sorry!

Some of the Wonkbloggers haven't, uh, quite finished their reading. So we're delaying until next Friday our discussion of Ira Katznelson's "Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time." But we haven't forgotten about this, we swear! Read full article >>

Josh Barro didn't leave conservatism. Conservatism left Josh Barro.

I know Josh Barro. Josh Barro is a friend of mine. Josh Barro does not climb trees and throw coconuts at you, as the Atlantic's graphic alleges. But he really, really, really likes talking about state pension systems. That part is true. And, these days, he doesn't come across as much of a Republican. That part is also true. Read full article >>

These 12 technologies will drive our economic future

Most of the writing you see about the economy speaks to narrow questions: What will growth be this year? When will the unemployment rate get back to normal? And so on. But the things that will determine standards of living a generation from now have almost nothing to do with this month's jobs report or the Federal Reserve's latest policy meeting. Those determinants, Instead, depend on companies'

U.S. infrastructure spending has plummeted since 2008

Not surprisingly, the collapse of a bridge along Interstate 5 in Washington state yesterday has revived the long-standing debate over whether Congress should spend more to repair the nation's aging roads and bridges. Read full article >>

Scandals usually lead to reform. Maybe not this time.

Put aside the politics, and the question of who-knew-what-when. There are two policy problems highlighted by the controversies at the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice. The first is the growth of 501(c)(4) groups into vehicles for anonymous and unlimited political spending. The second is the Obama administration's overzealous prosecution of leaks. Read full article >>

Obama's six-point plan to wind down the 'war on terror'

Like all presidential speeches, President Obama's Thursday address at the National Defense University was suffused with soaring rhetoric. But it was also a substantive and analytical speech, laying out the president's conceptual framework for counterterrorism operations and announcing a number of new policy initiatives. Here, stripped of rhetorical flourishes, is what Obama has planned for his s

Mr. Money Mustache answers his doubters

Read full article >>

Five ways to protect journalists and their anonymous sources

In a speech Thursday at National Defense University, President Obama discussed the Justice Department's prosecution of leakers, emphasizing the need to "strike the right balance between our security and our open society." Many observers believe that current laws do too little to protect the rights of journalists to gather information about national security — and the right of government employee

Low interest rates are the final straw for many company pensions

It was no small matter for the ILM Group’s executives when they froze the pension plan that has provided retirement security for the firm’s employees since 1947.The financial pressure of maintaining the plan had been mounting on the small insurer for years. But until March, ILM had not given in, even as tens of thousands of other employers did. It held on when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist at

Wonkbook: Some very good news for Obamacare

_Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog._ Read full article >>

The best sentences we read today

-- "Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing has revealed he was once jumped on by a panda when he dared himself to enter its cage."-- "You'd think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrel

Jon Gruber on one reason to keep taxing corporate income

MIT economist Jon Gruber writes in:Nice piece on the corporate tax. But you don't mention one important issue and to my mind the main argument for the corporate tax: if you don't tax corporate income, then you don't tax the earnings until it is released to shareholders. That is akin to the problem with taxing foreign income -- you give an incentive for companies to hoard the money rather than

Sorry, Chuck Grassley. Obama isn't 'packing the court.'

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee Sri Srinivasan won unanimous approval Thursday by the Senate. But before he did, his nomination led to one of the more amusing moments on C-SPAN in recent memory.Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) used a hearing on Srinivasan's nomination to accuse the Obama administration of trying to "pack" the D.C. Circuit. And then repeated the accusation another five times

Seven thrilling facts about carbon taxes from the CBO

Sure, Congress isn't exactly on the verge of passing a carbon tax. But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) keeps releasing detailed analyses of the proposal anyway — just in case it comes up as, say, part of a broader budget deal. Read full article >>

California Obamacare premiums: No 'rate shock' here

Health insurers will charge 25-year-olds between $142 and $190 per month for a bare-bones health plan in Los Angeles.A 40-year-old in San Francisco who wants a top-of-the-line plan would receive a bill between $451 and $525. Downgrade to a less robust option, and premiums fall as low as $221. Read full article >>

READ: President Obama's speech on the future of the war on terror

_As prepared for delivery._ It's an honor to return to the National Defense University. Here, at Fort McNair, Americans have served in uniform since 1791 standing guard in the early days of the Republic, and contemplating the future of warfare here in the 21st century. Read full article >>

Let's get rid of corporate taxes altogether

Forget trying to make Apple pay higher taxes. How about if we don't make them pay any taxes at all?Mitt Romney got roundly mocked for saying, "corporations are people, too," but he had a point. Talk to tax economists for very long and they'll make a variant of the same argument. The question in corporate taxation isn't whether it's paid by people. Of course it is. It's how much of it is paid

Have U.S. states figured out a way to avoid a global race to the bottom on taxes?

This week'suproar over Apple's tax strategies merely highlighted something that everyone in the tax world already knows. The U.S. corporate tax system is needlessly complex, dysfunctional and needs to be fixed. Could there be an elegant solution right under our noses? Read full article >>

The weirdest square mile of ocean on Earth

Jason Kottke passes along this video of the Lembeh Strait, which is known to divers as "the planet's most intriguing and bizarre square mile of ocean floor." The Seas Strangest Square Mile. from Shark Bay Films on Vimeo. Read full article >>

How our community colleges are falling behind

Pop quiz: What's the biggest category of college or university in the United States? Is it big public research universities like UC Berkeley or the University of Texas at Austin? Or is it their private equivalents, like Boston University and Brigham Young? Maybe all the small liberal arts colleges, like the University of Mary Washington or St. John's in Annapolis have, between them, the most stu

Everything you need to know about Obama's war on leakers in one FAQ

There's been a blizzard of news about the Obama administration's crackdown on government officials who leak classified information to the media. Last week we learned that the government seized the phone records of more than 100 Associated Press journalists. This week we learned that the government had accused (though not charged) journalist James Rosen with a crime for accepting classified infor

Poverty is growing twice as fast in the suburbs as in cities

At some point during the 2000s, America reached an unexpected milestone: There are now more poor people living in the suburbs than in the inner cities.That stat comes from a big new Brookings Institution book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, _Confronting Suburban Poverty in America_. They find that between 2000 and 2011, the number of suburban poor in the United States grew by 64 percen

Yikes! The Japanese stock market cratered overnight

Well that was fast.Japanese financial markets have experienced a stunning rise over the past six months, as a new government led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced policies of aggressive Keynesian stimulus paired with equally aggressive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan. The surest, steadiest bet on global financial markets in that time has been on rising Japanese stocks and a falling

Meet Farzad Mostashari, the bow-tie bureaucrat convincing doctors to go digital

The United States hit a health care milestone Wednesday: Most doctors now use electronic health care records. The new data, released by the Department of Health and Human Services, shows that more than 50 percent of doctors and 80 percent of hospitals have received enhanced federal funding for achieving "meaningful use" of digital records. That means they've gone beyond purchasing the software a

Wonkbook: Bernanke lashes Congress

_Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog._ Read full article >>

Fed’s mixed message takes stocks on a wild ride

When Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke spoke Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, his words seemed to hint that the central bank’s stimulus wouldn’t be pulled back anytime soon. The Dow Jones industrial average surged. Read full article >>