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But today does mark an end. I've been at TAP for almost four years. I moved to Washington, DC in September of 2005 to take the writing fellowship. The next year, I became a staff writer. The year after that, an associate editor. I've seen three editors, two offices, and four writing fellows. I've shared a cubicle with Matt Yglesias and a hotel room with Mark Schmitt. I've spent long nights at The Black Rooster. I have stolen candy from Richard Boriskin's candy bowl and I have stolen candy from Ann Friedman's candy bowl. I've written dozens of features, around a hundred columns, and thousands of blog posts containing literally millions of words. And there's not been a day that I haven't been proud to work here.

That's true, of course, because of the magazine's politics. But also because of its approach. The Prospect is one of the few unrepentantly wonkish outfits in existence. It's one of the few magazines where I could've pitched a profile of Congressional Budget Director Peter Orszag -- this was before he became a star, mind you -- and been given the enthusiastic go-ahead. My editor's particular interest in the piece was the opportunity to explore the importance of the budget scoring process. In the editing process, we actually cut the glitzy stuff about Orszag's tilt towards behavioral economics.

Pause on that for a minute. The Prospect, to its credit, has always rejected the idea that readers wouldn't be interested in something even though it was important. To be fair, that's a product of our business model: A non-profit isn't dependent on advertising revenue, and so can take chances that a for-profit can't. But the Prospect's model has not been disproven. Quite the opposite, I think.

The Obama era has been a period of policy. Of substance. The drama is in the budget, the composition of the stimulus bill, the survival of the banking system, the inclusion of a public plan, the fight over climate change. It's not that we've put away childish things. Rush Limbaugh's name, for instance, is still in the news. But we've also learned to pay attention to adult things. The Prospect has been doing that for almost two decades now, and they provided me with a home to do the same. And the Prospect was right. Turns out that you can build an audience with charts and graphs and hearings and budget commentary. The words "reconciliation," "nationalization," and "community rating" do not scare readers away. Scatterplots do not harm your traffic. Indeed, the Washington Post is asking me to cover the same topics in the same way at their site. But I would never have had this opportunity, or been able to build this model, without TAP -- both the space it gave me and the guidance it provided me. I'll be forever grateful to it.

Which is why, even though I'm leaving, I urge you to stay. That's not to say you shouldn't immediately bookmark my new blog and check it obsessively every day. It'll have that same great Ezra taste, but with more resources around to make my charts look pretty. But make sure Tapped is on your blogroll, too. And make sure you're receiving the American Prospect magazine at home. And make sure you're checking out the homepage every morning. Keep an eye on the place for me.

Either way, what actually happened today is that the OMB gave the EPA license to go forward with its reclassification of carbon. This would, in theory, give the EPA the ability to regulate carbon autonomously. If Congress fails to act on cap and trade, in other words, the EPA can do some of the job itself. And it may do it in ways that the energy industry finds less congenial. Orszag put this pretty explicitly back in April:

The President has made it clear that he wants to move the nation toward clean energy, and that part of that effort involves a legislative approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions under a "cap and trade" program. Such a program would be more effective and efficient than most types of regulation. While such a program is being debated in the Congress, however, the Administration is following both the science and the law with regard to the Clean Air Act.

Last week, a massive coalition of business groups sent a "Dear Senator" letter that stated, "let us be clear and frank on this matter; there can be no acceptable 'compromise' on any issue of labor law reform due to the very real threat posed by EFCA." Huh. "That hardly sounds like bargaining in good faith," sighed the Washington Post. And the increasing perception of employer stubbornness is lending life to compromise proposals. One such idea is being floated by Arlen Specter, who desperately wants SEIU's help in his next election. He's backing a set of fixes that would speed elections -- the vote would come no more than three weeks after a request is filed -- and guarantee organizers "equal time under identical circumstances" to make their pitch to employees. So if management holds a captive audience meeting, then they have to give organizers the same opportunity.

The corporate community opposes this, too. But having predicated their assault on a principled belief in "workplace democracy," it's extremely hard for them to credibly oppose reforms that would help bring democracy to the workplace. Just as the unions chose poor ground when they centered their fight around card check, the business community has made a bad decision centering their counterattack around workplace democracy.

But even so, both programs face challenges. What probably won't make it into many stories, however, is the relative severity of the problems. The crude fix for Social Security actually sounds quite manageable: "Social Security could be brought into actuarial balance over the next 75 years with changes equivalent to an immediate 16 percent increase in the payroll tax (from a rate of 12.4 percent to 14.4 percent) or an immediate reduction in benefits of 13 percent or some combination of the two."

Conversely, the crude fix for Medicare -- and this is only the hospital insurance side of Medicare -- is more brutal. "The Medicare Report shows that the HI Trust Fund could be brought into actuarial balance over the next 75 years by changes equivalent to an immediate 134 percent increase in the payroll tax (from a rate of 2.9 percent to 6.78 percent), or an immediate 53 percent reduction in program outlays, or some combination of the two." To put it simply, imagine how much health care your grandparents can access. Now cut it by a bit more than half. They're not allowed to be in the hospitals on every odd day, or on holidays. There you go.

The relative urgency of Medicare's problem is pretty simple to explain. As the Trustees Report says, "While both programs face demographic challenges, rapidly growing health care costs also affect Medicare." In other words, Social Security is only affected by demographics. Medicare is also being buffeted by rising health care prices. If we can't get those under control, we can't fix Medicare. And if we can't fix Medicare, then it's not just the Medicare program that will be insolvent. It's the federal government.

But the number is more complicated than it seems. Building a bridge creates a certain number of jobs. But it also requires you to buy a lot of cement. Cutting taxes for small businesses helps preserve jobs. But it does that by helping them pay the rent. Pumping billions into Pell grants helps kids secure better jobs because they can graduate from college. But it really just replaces tuition that would otherwise be paid by richer families.

The stimulus was primarily, but not only, a job creation package. It also spread broadband and strengthened universities and built trains and helped schools. Much of the fear in a recession is that investments important to tomorrow's economy stop happening. Fewer students go to college and fewer roads get repaired. The stimulus spent quite a bit paying for the ongoing investments that mean tomorrow's economy will have jobs, and many of them will even be good jobs.

Obama's personal popularity stayed remarkably stable throughout the course of the campaign, and the average unfavorable rating barely ever cracked 35%. Obama the campaigner looks downright polarizing compared to Obama the President, who now sports a 65/25 fav/unfav in the Pollster.com average.

Why is this important? Republicans right now haven't the slightest idea of how to reduce the President's appeal because they've never actually done it before. It would be one thing if Obama had become a controversial figure during the campaign, like Bill Clinton did in 1992, providing fodder for a comeback once he did get into office, but that possibility scarcely exists today.

While personality may not be everything, and real-world policy outcomes provide opportunities for inflection points, it rarely ever works out that a President's policy agenda is unsuccessful while he remains personally popular. Yes, there are weird situations where a President might be personally loathed (Clinton post-Monica) but politically successful, but not (that I know of) the other way around.

This sort of thing is particularly important when passing complicated pieces of policy. In general, it's very hard for voters to evaluate health care legislation or a cap and trade plan. So they often evaluate the politicians associated with the legislation. If a politician they trust stands on a podium and tells them a particular bill is a good idea, and a politician they don't trust stands on the other podium and says the bill is a bad idea, they go with the politician they trust. That, obviously, is a stark hypothetical. But it's a pretty good description of the current situation. The American people trust Obama. There is no high-profile GOP spokesperson with similarly high approval ratings.

Put slightly differently, in 1994, the Republican Party had Bob Dole. Who do they have today? In 1994, the GOP used Whitewater to erode public trust in Bill and Hillary Clinton. What do they have today? The problem for the Republican Party is not simply that they lack popular leadership. It's that the Democratic Party doesn't share their dilemma.

We're probably at the beginning of the period when it becomes more expensive for the government to borrow. Since the recession began, it's been uncommonly cheap. As the recession ends, it'll normalize. So if the government is planning to borrow a whole bunch of money in the near future, it might be a good idea to lock it in now, while 30-year rates are low, rather than later, when they rise again.

The first is the ideological objection. Some conservatives worry that the "the type of information collected by CER could eventually be used inappropriately if a 'Federal Health Board' was created to decide which types of treatment would be available to whom and when." It's worth parsing this for a moment: The apparent fear here is that the evidence from comparative effectiveness will be, well, used to make treatment decisions. But that can't be quite right. We use evidence all the time. Your insurer won't pay for a leg amputation when your symptom is a headache. Medicare doesn't cover a wheelchair if you're diagnosed with acute constipation. No one whines about that.

The fear, rather, is that the existence of more evidence will somehow qualitative change the way government uses evidence. The government will decree, in other words, that their testing shows back surgery ineffective, and back surgery is now illegal. Put slightly differently:

Step 1: Comparative effectiveness review.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Authoritarian medical system

It's sort of what would happen if you applied The Road to Serfdom to the comparative effectiveness debate.

The industry's fear is quite different: This is the profit objection. Right now, most research on, say, drug effectiveness is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. That presents obvious advantages for them and problems for us. The concern here is that if they cease controlling the flow of evidence, then new studies will show that certain treatments don't work. For instance: Claritin goes off patent. Generic versions emerge. They're very cheap. Claritin's manufacturer changes the chemical composition slightly and comes up with Clarinex. They apply for a new patent. They sell it at a heavy mark-up. But it probably doesn't work much better. If there's credible evidence out there showing that it doesn't work much better, that's the end of that business strategy.

But this is the debate. Supporters of comparative effectiveness reform want information on whether medical treatments work. Some conservatives are worried that the government will take that evidence and use it to craft a totalitarian health care system. They are worried about anything that could further empower government. Some members of the medical device and pharmaceutical industry are worried that the existence of that evidence will reduce their profit margins. They are worried about anything that would hurt profits. But what's important about these objections is that they have nothing to do with comparative effectiveness review. Conservatives don't want to empower government. Industries don't want to sacrifice profits. This is an argument over principles that's simply taken the form of an argument over policy.

The attached article sheds some more light on the negotiations between bank presidents and the government's stress testers. Particularly worrying is the government's decision to switch from measuring tangible common equity to Tier 1 common capital. Tangible common equity is the more traditional measurement, but if it had been used, the banks would have had to raise an additional $68 billion. Aside from that, there's not been an explanation offered for the change.

The article also suggests that some banks are rather more persuasive than others. Citigroup managed to knock the government's final judgment from $35 billion in needed capital to a paltry $5.5 billion in needed capital. Bank of America, conversely, could only get from $50 billion to $33.9 billion. Impressive, but nothing like Citigroup's all-star performance.

Cap-and-trade is a real-world program for reducing pollutants. We used it successfully with sulfur emissions in the 90s. Europe is already doing it with carbon. The northeastern states are doing it with RGGI. The Waxman-Markey bill is a real piece of legislation that's hundreds of pages long and festooned with a hundred different compromises that will (we hope) allow it to survive the legislative sausage grinder.

And all of these variations of cap-and-trade are complicated. When you read about them, you're immediately bombarded with jargon: auctions vs. allocations; caps, floors, offsets, and banking; upstream vs. downstream; how the exchange should be set up; how often permits should be sold; etc. etc. Those are all real-life questions, and in any real-life plan they have to be addressed. And they're confusing. And yes, they all provide potential toeholds for special interests to game the system — something we should fight like banshees to keep to a minimum.

Tax advocates have no such worries. They propose that we simply tax various fuels based on their carbon content, and voila! We're done. Simple and easy.

Ironically, though, the only reason they can get away with this is because of the very fact that a tax is a political nonstarter, which means there are no real-world taxes on the table. But if there were, they'd have all the same questions as a cap-and-trade plan, plus a whole bunch of new ones. Should it be levied upstream or downstream? Can it be tax sheltered offshore? Are you allowed to apply a tax-loss carryforward to your carbon tax levy? How do you harmonize the tax with other countries? Can I get a tax credit for reducing carbon emissions? How are the revenues going to be distributed? Should midwestern states that rely more on coal-fired plants get treated differently than, say, California? What would it take to make a carbon tax on foreign oil compatible with WTO rules?

Rhetorically, tax advocates can pretend that none of these questions exist. They're able to contrast the genuine messiness of a real-world cap-and-trade plan with a Platonic, whiteboard version of a tax plan.

But that's not how it would work. If cap-and-trade goes down, we're not going to get a tax instead. And if we do eventually get a tax instead, it's not going to be a clean and simple tax. It's going to be a thousand-page monster with every paragraph the subject of a slugfest between a dozen different special interests lobbying half a dozen different congressional committees. That's reality.

It will look, in other words, very much like our actual tax code. Which is not to say that there's no argument for a carbon tax. But you can't simply argue that a theoretical carbon tax is more elegant than existing cap and trade legislation. The difference there is not between an apple and an orange. It's the difference between something you dreamed last night and something you might actually do today.

The opponents of health reform are, at this juncture, entirely isolated. Industry is adopting an attitude of relentless positivity. Republicans are grudgingly attempting to appear cooperative. The only straight opposition is coming, as Maddow and Howard Dean say, from Rick Scott, a disgraced former hospital executive whose company was convicted of defrauding the federal government in the largest ever case of its kind.

You can say, of course, that the traditional opponents of reform will rapidly find their voice when the bill emerges. But they're lagging. The difference between this year and 1994 is that in 1994, it was the opponents of reform who spent the preceding year massing their forces and organizing their grassroots. This year, it's Health Care for America Now and SEIU and MoveOn.org and Obama for America who have spent the last 12 months building out their organizational capabilities. The campaign on behalf of reform, in other words, is significantly farther along than the campaign against reform. That's true even on the simplest level: Supporters of reform know who they are. Opponents of reform, as of yet, do not. And by the time they come to clarity on that, it may be too late.