Dean Baker's Blog, page 187

Quick Kids, How Much Money is $1.3 Billion to the State of Alaska?

Sure, everyone knows that $1.3 billion is roughly 9.0 percent of the state's $13.8 billion 2015 budget. That's why the NYT never bothered to put this figure in any context for its readers in an article on how the state is dealing with a sharp falloff in oil revenue.

Paul Krugman’s Stock Market Advice

Paul Krugman actually did not make any predictions on the stock market, so those looking to get investment advice from everyone’s favorite Nobel Prize winning economist will be disappointed. But he did make some interesting comments on the market’s new high. Some of these are on the mark, but some could use some further elaboration.

I’ll start with what is right. First, Krugman points out that the market is horrible as a predictor of the future of the economy. The market was also at a record...

Bloomberg Asks Wall Street How It Feels About Taxing Wall Street

Bloomberg is really pushing the frontiers in journalism. In order to give readers a balanced account of a proposal by Representative Peter DeFazio to impose a 0.03 percent tax on financial transactions (that's 3 cents on every hundred dollars) it went to the spokesperson for the Investment Company Institute, the chief investment officer from Vanguard, and an academic with extensive ties to the financial industry. It also presented an assertion on the savings from electronic trading from Marki...

The Washington Post Tells Us About Painful Choices on Health Care Spending

The Washington Post reported on new projections on national health care spending by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The projections are that health care costs will outpace the growth of the economy, rising from the current 17 percent of GDP to 20 percent by 2025. It then provides readers with a warning from Katherine Hempstead, a researcher at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation:

"Even under the rather optimistic assumption that health care spending grow no more quickly...

What Sort of Creatures Live In Greece?

That's what folks must have been wondering after reading this Bloomberg piece singing the praises of Antonio Weiss's work on restructuring Puerto Rico's debt. The piece told readers:

"Weiss, 49, a former Lazard Ltd. investment banker who spent almost two decades on Wall Street, became a champion for the island’s cause — a debt crisis with a human toll."

A debt crisis having a human toll, imagine that.

Let's Introduce Uber to Some Competition Policy

Eduardo Porter argued in his column that part of the story of growing inequality is a failure of competition policy. The argument is that increased concentration in a number of industries has led to rents being shared by high earning employees in the largest firms. Porter cites research from Jason Furman, the current head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, the former chief of the Office of Management and Budget, which support this view.

While Porter mentions a number of fi...

NYT Worries that Paul Ryan, Who Called for Eliminating Most of the Federal Government, Will No Longer Be Able to Sell the G.O.P Agenda

It speaks to the truly bizarre nature of political reporting that a person who calls for eliminating most areas of the federal government in the next three decades (exceptions are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the Defense Department) is viewed as a thoughtful moderate, but that is how the NYT and the rest of the media treat House Speaker Paul Ryan. Somehow, we are supposed to ignore the fact that Speaker Ryan has repeatedly proposed budgets that would eliminate federal funding f...

NYT's Bizarre Balance on the Affordable Care Act

The media often feel the need to be balanced in its coverage of Republicans and Democrats even when the evidence doesn't lend itself to much balance. We got a strange example of such an effort at balance in a NYT article reporting on a piece on the Affordable Care Act by President Obama that ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the NYT piece, Obama said that he would like to see larger subsidies for the health insurance policies in the exchanges, that he would...

Yet Another Column on the Deficit/Debt by an Innumerate Author

No, I'm not engaging in name calling, this is based on Barton Swaim's self-description of his abilities in his Washington Post column on the United States being in decline. Swaim, a contributing columnist to the Washington Post complained to readers that the United States is becoming a European-style regulatory state, then added:

"neither the country’s political class nor its voters seem to care that the national debt has reached literally incomprehensible levels; ..."

In fact, the numerate a...

Can't the NYT Find Someone Who Isn't Scared by Numbers to Talk About the Deficit?

Apparently the answer is "no." Steven Rattner used his NYT column to make the important complaint that we are starving large areas of the federal government, leading to a deteriorating infrastructure and poor quality public service. All of this is fine. It has been said a few hundred thousand times, but it can't hurt to say it a few hundred thousand more.

But then Rattner tells us:

"Yes, we needed to bring the deficit down. And yes, we still face terrifyingly large obligations in years to com...