Dean Baker's Blog, page 202

Reporters Who Haven't Noticed That Paul Ryan Has Called for Eliminating Most of Federal Government Go Nuts Over Bernie Sanders' Lack of Specifics

The Washington press corps has gone into one of its great feeding frenzies over Bernie Sanders' interview with New York Daily News. Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions posed, which the D.C. gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.

Among the frenzied were the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, The Atlantic's David Graham, and Vanity Fair's Tina Nguyen, and CNN's Dylan Byers telling about it all. Having read the transcript of the interview...

The Elite's Comforting Myth: We Had to Screw Rich Country Workers to Help the World's Poor

Roger Cohen gave us yet another example of touching hand-wringing from elite types about the plight of the working class in rich countries. The gist of the piece is that in Europe and the U.S. we have seen growing support for candidates outside of the mainstream on both the left and the right. Cohen acknowledges that there is a real basis for their rejection of the mainstream: they have seen decades of stagnating wages. However, Cohen tells us the plus side of this story, we have seen huge im...

Is Competition the Cause of the Productivity Slowdown

Contrary to the robots taking our jobs story, Robert Samuelson gets the basic story right. Productivity growth has fallen through the floor, rather than going through the roof as the robot story would have us believe. Productivity growth has averaged just over 1.0 percent annually since the start of the recession in December of 2007. It has been less than 0.4 percent a year in the last two years. 

Samuelson speculates that this slow growth might be due to the old economy competing with t...

Wage Wars at the Fed

The NYT article on the March jobs report featured several economists describing the current state of the economy in glowing terms. Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, described the current economic situation as being a “near Goldlocks scenario.” He said the jobs and wage gains in March were healthy, but not so strong as to prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates to slow growth.

Michelle Meyer, deputy head of United States economics at Bank...

Retiring Baby Boomers Are Not the Main Reason for the Drop in Labor Force Participation

The Washington Post repeated one of the major myths about the recovery in an article in the March employment report when it told readers:

"In the long shadow of the recession, the share of the population in the work force sunk to 62.4 percent in September, the
lowest level in nearly 40 years. The government calculates that number by counting the people who have a job or are actively
looking for one. That means students, retirees and stay-at-home parents are generally not considered part of th...

Did Uber Take the NYT for a Ride?

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the paid content and the news stories in the NYT. Farhad Manjoo’s piece on Uber’s new carpooling service could leave any reader confused. Manjoo seems to have taken everything Uber said about this service at face value, just as one would expect in paid content.

We can start with the story that sets up the piece. The story is that Abby is going from San Francisco Tenderloin district to the Noe Valley, a trip which the piece tells us would ordina...

Wall Street Journal Hypes Financial Industry Scare Story on Public Pensions

Okay, since it seems the WSJ is recycling a NYT piece, I will recycle a blogpost.

Most newspapers try to avoid the self-serving studies that industry groups put out to try to gain public support for their favored policies. But apparently the New York Times does not feel bound by such standards. It ran a major news story on a study by Citigroup that was designed to scare people about the state of public pensions and encourage them to trust more of their retirement savings to the financial ind...

NAFTA and Auto Jobs: Would Importing Doctors from Mexico Increase Demand for Doctors in the U.S.?

Eduardo Porter had an interesting piece in the NYT in which he argued that NAFTA actually saved jobs for auto workers in the United States. The argument is that by allowing U.S. manufacturers to have easier access to low cost labor in Mexico for part of their operation, they were able to keep a larger market share than would otherwise be the case.

The same would apply to foreign manufacturers choosing to locate operations in the United States rather than staying in Europe, Japan, or elsewhere...

Vox on the Bernie Sanders Tax Tsunami

I'm tied up with many other things, but since folks asked, I will give a quick comment/explanation of the Vox analysis of Bernie Sanders' tax plans. For those who haven't seen it, Vox put together a calculator that allows people to plug in their income and then see how their tax bill would change under the tax plans proposed by Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. For the first two, most people get tax cuts. There is little change with Clinton, but big tax increases wi...

If the Economy Fell Into Recession, Would Anyone Notice?

The prospect of Donald Trump getting the Republican presidential nomination is dominating media attention these days, with some cause, but this has meant that evidence of a weakening economy has been largely ignored. We have seen a series of reports in the last month suggesting that the economy is likely to perform considerably worse than the 2.5 percent growth rate predicted by most economists at the start of the year. (The Congressional Budget Office's projection was 2.7 percent.)

The most...