Day after day, he delivers great stuff on health care and other economic policy. He’s able to play the policy wonk, political insider, and sharp-eyed blogger, providing lots of information in small bundles that are easy to digest. Some great recent quotes:
“If you had tuned in six months ago for 10 minutes, you would have had all the information necessary to predict exactly where we'd be today. Democrats commanded exactly 60 votes, which meant that they had enough potential supporters to overcome a filibuster, but that each individual senator had sufficient leverage to extract enormous concessions in the final days. … Pretty much everything else has been a distraction, at least so far as the bill's ultimate fortune is concerned. The chaos of August didn't change a single vote. The Gang of Six didn't net firm bipartisan support. The president's speech didn't end the controversies. The deficit reduction embedded in the bill didn't assure a large majority.”
Or: “One of the costs of not passing health-care reform, it seems, is that policies in the individual market will cost about 23 percent more than they will under reform. A vote against change is, in effect, a vote for that.”
Or: “We've had wars of necessity, wars of choice, and the escalations of those wars stretching across both good and bad economies, and both Democratic and Republican presidents. And none of them have been paid for. The political system is learning to think of war as an off-budget expense, which is bad both from the perspective of the deficit, but also from the perspective of forcing us to confront the costs and tradeoffs of war.”
Or this interesting insight into media and politics.
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