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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.
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Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero � all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Questions Asked and Answered

By Megan McArdle
Dec 17 2010, 4:17 PM ET Comment

I will stop referring to it as ObamaCare when we stop calling them the Bush tax cuts for the rich.  It is an effective shorthand for a law that is otherwise unwieldy to describe.  If legislators wanted me to call it something else, they should have given it a catchy name like "Medicare", not a hypertrophied piece of propaganda like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  I don't know why the left considers the term particularly perjorative; it is a health care program, and it is Barack Obama's signature legislation.  Why is it supposed to be undignified to attach his name to it?  One of James' commenters says, "ObamaCare sounds like a term someone would use, hoping it fails miserably, and wanting people to remember who did it.   So it is not non-judgmental. Quite the contrary."  

Personally, I have no such lofty agenda; I just don't have a better term for it.  But surely progressives think it is going to succeed.  Shouldn't they be thrilled that the rest of us are associating Obama's name with it at every turn?

Update:  Apparently I need to make clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with "Bush tax cuts for the rich", though I get some snippy conservatives who disagree occasionally.  It's the easiest description, and everyone understand what you're talking about.  I'm not trying to trade one for the other; I'm planning to keep using both.


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