Dean Baker's Blog, page 107

How to Fix Facebook's Phony Feed Problem: It's Fun and Easy

It seems that bad guys (Russians and others) are using Facebook to spread all sorts of nonsense under false identities. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO and very rich person, tells us that he is very concerned about the problem but doesn't know exactly what to do. Congress can help out Facebook and Zuckerberg.

Back in the late 1990s, when the Internet was rapidly becoming an important means of communication, the entertainment industry became concerned about people transferring copies of copyri...

Republicans Don't Want to Waste Money on Arts and Humanities that Could Pay for Donald Trump's Golf Trips

Donald Trump is proposing to eliminate the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, as noted in an NYT column today. Each agency received just under $150 million in the 2017 budget, an amount that is equal to just under 0.004 percent of total spending. Another way to think about the money the government spends promoting the arts and the humanities is comparing it to spending on Donald Trump's golfing trips.

According to calculations from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, w...

Trump's 3 Percent GDP Growth: Is It Crazy?

In an NYT Upshot column, Neil Irwin correctly points out that the Trump administration is very optimistic about GDP growth, it then adds that it shouldn't be. Irwin is certainly right about the optimistic part but should be more cautious in declaring the optimism wrong.

Irwin breaks down the factors that contribute to growth, labor, capital, and multifactor productivity growth. Labor growth is likely to be slow for the simple reason that the baby boom generation is moving into its sixties and...

Charles Lane and the Washington Post Continue Attack on Unions: Disturbed to Discover the Importance of Precedent in Court Decisions

The Washington Post has long had a hostile attitude toward unions, which it expresses in both its opinion and news sections. (As an example of the latter, this front page article complaining about high pensions for public sector workers in California, highlighted the case of Bruce Malkenhorst Sr., a retired city administrator, who received a pension of more than $500,000 a year. Only after reading down in the piece do readers discover that Mr. Malkenhorst was awaiting trial for misusing publi...

Health Care Costs May Not Rise As Much as Projected

The Washington Post reported on new health care spending projections from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) which show spending rising to almost 20 percent of GDP by 2026 compared to 17.9 percent in 2016. It is worth noting that these projections have consistently overstated cost growth. For example in 2005, CMS projected that health care costs would rise to 19.6 percent of GDP in 2016.

The piece also notes that prescription drugs are projected to be the most rapidly growin...

Trump Administration Plans to Make Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Improper Payments

That's what careful readers of the administration's budget must assume. After all, the budget tells us that we should expect savings of $59 billion in 2028 from reducing "improper payments Government-wide" (Table S-2). However, we build up to these large annual savings very gradually. There is nothing noted for savings in 2019 and just $1 billion in 2020. Even in 2024, the last year of a hypothetical second Trump administration, the projected savings are only $6 billion. 

If we assume th...

How Does the Washington Post Know That the White House "Believes" Trump Plan for Food Stamps Would Improve Food Quality?

Hey, I thought it was just a way to give a middle finger to low-income people for getting government aid, but the Washington Post tells readers that the plan to provide baskets of food in place of the current cash-like system where we allow people to buy the food they want:

"It would do this [hugely cut spending on food stamps] in part by requiring many beneficiaries to accept food deliveries in addition to financial assistance, a change the White House believes will improve nutrition qualit...

NYT Denounces Congress's "Free-Spending Ways" In News Article

Most newspapers try to reserve such editorializing for the opinion pages, but a NYT article on the Trump budget told readers:

"Yet for all of the talk of fiscal restraint, Mr. Trump’s budget also amounted to an institutional surrender to the free-spending ways of Capitol Hill, which Mr. Mulvaney said had surprised the president and prompted him to refrain from even bothering to advocate deficit reduction."

This is far from the only issue with this piece. The headline tells readers that the...

Cuomo and New York State Take the Lead in Fighting Back Against Republican Tax Plan

One of the major changes in the Republican tax plan that became law at the end of last year was a limit of $10,000 on the deduction for state and local income taxes. This was explicitly designed as an attack on liberal states like California and New York, which provide relatively high quality services for their residents, and therefore have higher taxes. Many Republicans openly boasted that these states would face pressure to reduce their taxes, and therefore also cut funding in areas like ed...

One Way to Protect Democracy Is to Stop Pushing Policies that Redistribute Income Upward

That one is apparently not on the agenda, at least according to Amanda Taub's NYT "The Interpreter" piece. The piece notes the declining support for center right and center left parties in most western democracies. While it notes that people feel unrepresented by these parties, it never states the obvious, these parties have consistently supported monetary, fiscal, trade, and intellectual property policies that redistribute an ever-larger share of income to people like Bill Gates and Robert R...