Dean Baker's Blog, page 140

The Closing of Retail Stores: Where are the Cheerleaders for Trade?

The NYT had a piece on how many smaller cities that have already lost factory jobs are no seeing a loss of jobs in retail due to the growth of online shopping.The article provides an interesting picture of some of the cities in industrial Midwest and Northeast that have already lost many of their manufacturing jobs and are now seeing major retailers shut their doors.

What is striking is that the piece doesn't present any economists saying how this is good news, as is usually the case on piece...

Insulin Is Expensive Because the Government Makes it Expensive

The Washington Post had an interesting column by a doctor that discussed the difficulties his diabetic patients face dealing with the high cost of insulin. While the doctor, David Trigdell, does call for measures by the government to reduce the price that patients and insurers have to pay for the drug, he doesn't ask the most basic questions about why the price is high in the first place.

This gets back to how the government finances medical research. To a large extent it relies on patent mon...

The I.R.S. Outsources Debt Collection Because How Else Could People In Financial Industry Survive?

The financial sector is chock full of people with no useful skills. This is why the government has to devise make-work projects like collecting back taxes owed to the I.R.S. for these people to do. As the NYT reports, this practice consistently leads to abuses by the collectors and often ends up losing the government money. But hey, at least it creates some good-paying jobs in these companies and a nice return to their shareholders.

Older Healthy People Won't Buy Coverage

The Senate health care plan hugely substantially increases the cost of insurance for older pre-Medicare age people to young people, and it eliminates the penalty for not buying insurance, so naturally the NYT tells us:

"That could inadvertently discourage the youngest and healthiest people from buying insurance, leaving a higher percentage of sicker people with expensive treatments on the exchanges, driving up insurers’ costs."

If you raise the cost of insurance for older people relative to y...

Medicaid and Driving West in New Jersey: Both are Unsustainable

As we all know, driving west in New Jersey is unsustainable. After all, if you keep going west, you will eventually end up in the Pacific Ocean. That's pretty damn unsustainable. It would have been helpful if the Washington Post had clarified for readers that when the Republican health care experts cited in this piece called Medicaid "unsustainable" they meant it in the same way. 

The Republicans were celebrating the prospect of the Senate's health care reform bill which includes large tax cu...

Will the Old Invincibles Sink Trumpcare?

That's the question millions are asking as the Senate plows ahead with its plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Okay, I don't think anyone is actually asking this question, but they should be if they are trying to take the Senate plan at face value.

As some folks may remember, we had a great wave of hysteria around the importance of the "young invincibles" for Obamacare. These were young healthy people who didn't think they would ever need insurance. The concern was that they would not sign...

Thomas Edsall Tells Us If We Define Globalization as a Process Designed to Redistribute Upward, the Working Class Won't Like Globalization

That's not exactly what Edsall said in his NYT column, but it is pretty damn close. The theme of Edsall's piece is that in the United States, as in other wealthy countries, the main political divide is between those who support and those who oppose globalization:

"...if we define globalization as receptivity to open borders, the expansion of local and nationalistic perspectives and support for a less rigid social order and for liberal cultural, immigration and trade policies."

The elites in...

NYC Pension Non-Crisis: Compare Liability to GDP

The NYT ran yet another piece highlighting the "crisis" in public pensions. This time the story is that pensions are in worse shape in New York City than they were in 1975 when the city faced bankruptcy. The way it gets this conclusion is by showing that pension payments and liabilities are larger, even after adjusting for inflation, than they were in the mid-1970s.

While this is true, it ignores the fact that New York's gross domestic product is close to three times as large today as it was...

Playing Games with Drugs at the Wall Street Journal

A column in the Wall Street Journal by Dana P. Goldman and Darius N. Lakdawalla presents a case for high drug prices by making an analogy to the salaries of major league baseball players. They ask what would happen if the average pay of major league players was cut from $4 million to $2 million. They hypothesize that the current crew of major leaguers would continue to play, but that young people might instead opt for different careers, leaving us with a less talented group of baseball player...

New York Times Uses News Section to Tell Readers It Doesn't Like French Labor Market Policy

Apparently the dislike at the NYT is so intense that they couldn't restrict it to the opinion pages. In an article on French President Emmanuel Macron's plans for changing France's labor market regulations, it referred to the current labor law as the, "rigid and job-killing labor code."

It is not at all clear that France's labor protections have a major impact on unemployment in the country. A cross-country analysis found no effect of employment regulations on unemployment. The more obvious c...