Dean Baker's Blog, page 211

Once Again, It’s Monday Morning and Robert Samuelson Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare

What else is new? Yep, the deficit is exploding and it will devastate our children and no one will listen:

“Based on the campaign so far, this important conversation seems unlikely. The leading candidates are playing Russian roulette with the nation’s future, assuming that deficits can be ignored because most Americans (or so it seems) would prefer it that way.”

Folks who pay attention to the economy might notice that the interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is now under 2.0 percent. Appar...

If the Washington Post Started Drug Testing Columnists George Will Might Need a New Job

In today’s column he makes a pitch for Republican tax reform telling readers;

“If there is going to be growth-igniting tax reform — and if there isn’t, American politics will sink deeper into distributional strife — Brady [Representative Kevin Brady, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee] will begin it. Fortunately, the Houston congressman is focused on this simple arithmetic: Three percent growth is not 1 percent better than 2 percent growth, it is 50 percent better.

“If the Obama...

Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and the Experts

I have tremendous respect for Paul Krugman. I also consider him a friend. For these reasons I am not eager to pick a fight with him, but there is something about his criticisms of Bernie Sanders that really bothered me.

In a blog post last week, Krugman told readers:

“As far as I can tell, every serious progressive policy expert on either health care or financial reform who has weighed in on the primary seems to lean Hillary.”

While I already had some fun with the idea of Krugman revoking the...

Understanding the Trump/Sanders Constituencies: Inequality Is Something the Elites Did

John Judis has an interesting piece in Vox on the success so far of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They have garnered the support of large numbers of voters who are disaffected with the agenda pushed by the mainstream in both parties. Judis argues that this agenda, which he alternatively describes as “neo-liberal” or “free market,” has been responsible for the rising economic insecurity of the white middle class. This insecurity has led Republicans to embrace Trump’s nationalistic and often...

Cheap Thoughts on Productivity Growth

It continues to amaze me that we have people simultaneously running around terrified that the robots will take all the jobs and at the same time that we will not have enough workers to support a growing population of retirees. (In some cases, it is the same people.) In the first case, productivity would have to go through the roof for a job shortage to be a problem. In the second case it would have to go through the floor, since even modest rates of productivity growth swamp the impact of the...

Washington Post Doubles Down in Support of TARP Wall Street Bailout

The Washington Post is unhappy that support of the TARP appears to be a liability on the campaign trail. After all, it tells readers:

“Then-Federal Reserve Chair Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson declared it indispensable to prevent another Great Depression.”

Yep, that would be Henry M. Paulson, who was CEO at Goldman Sachs before taking the job as Treasury Secretary. As far as Chair Bernanke’s assessment, it would be interesting to hear why he didn’t explain that the Fe...

Washington Post Doubles Down with Name Calling on Sanders

The Washington Post again went after Senator Bernie Sanders in its lead editorial, telling readers that the Senator's proposals were "facile." It might be advisable for a paper that described President Bush's case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as "irrefutable" to be cautious about going ad hominem, but this is the Washington Post.

Getting to the substance, the Post is unhappy with Sanders proposal for single payer health insurance which it argues will cost far more or deliver much l...

Washington Post Takes Wild Swings at Bernie Sanders

It’s not surprising that the Washington Post (owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos) would be unhappy with a presidential candidate running on a platform of taking back the country from the millionaires and billionaires. Therefore the trashing of Senator Bernie Sanders in an editorial, “Bernie Sanders fiction-filled campaign,” was about as predictable as the sun rising.

While there is much here that is misleading, it’s worth focusing on the central theme. The piece tells readers:

“The existence of...

Peterson Institute Study Shows TPP Will Lead to $357 Billion Increase in Annual Imports

A new study published by the Peterson Institute projects that the TPP will lead to an increase of $357 billion in annual imports when its effects are fully felt in 2030. This increase in imports will be equal to 1.4 percent of projected GDP in that year.

You probably didn’t see this projection in the write-ups of the analysis in the Washington Post, NYT, or elsewhere. That is likely because the study’s authors chose not to highlight it. Instead, in their abstract they told readers that they p...

Are the Irish Speeding? And Why It Means We Might be Throwing Trillions in the Toilet

I was struck to see a news article reporting the estimate from Ireland’s central bank that the economy grew by 6.6 percent in 2015. The article reported that the economy is projected to grow 4.8 percent in 2016 and 4.4 percent in 2017. This is good news for the Irish economy since the country still has a long way to go to recover from its recession.

However what is even more striking is that this growth hugely exceeds what folks like the I.M.F. said was possible in Ireland. If we go back to t...