Dean Baker's Blog, page 225

Do Green Jobs Boost the Economy?

The NYT was unfair in its fact check of the Democratic presidential candidates' claim that spending on the environment can be an engine for economic growth. The piece quotes Keith Hall, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

"The goal should be to secure the largest possible environmental benefit at the lowest economic cost. Counting green jobs equates to counting part of the economic cost of achieving this environmental impact. We want this to be small, not large.”

This i...

NYT Says Jeb Bush Wants to Raise Taxes on Small Business

Actually, the NYT did not say that Bush wanted to raise taxes on small businesses and it would not say this because it is not true. If for some reason one of its reporters mistaken drafted a story saying that it was true, an editor undoubtedly would have insisted that they double-check their source to make sure they got it right. That would be good journalism.

On the other hand, the NYT apparently does not exercise the same care when it comes to reporting on tax proposals for Wall Street. Thi...

FactCheck, Bernie Sanders, Social Security and the Budget Deficit

FactCheck has decided to revive its campaign on Social Security contributing to the budget deficit in the context of claiming that Senator Bernie Sanders is wrong on this issue. The basic point that Sanders and other targets of FactCheck have made is that Social Security was explicitly set up to be funded separately from the rest of the budget. It is legally prohibited from spending any money other than what it receives through its designated taxes and from the interest on the bonds bought wi...

Breakingviews Tries to Scare People Away from Bernie Sanders

It seems some establishment types are getting worried about the support that Senator Bernie Sanders is drawing in his presidential race. Breakingviews, the syndicated financial news service that promotes its "agenda setting insight," went full scare tactics in a piece warning about "Bernienomics."

The punchline is in the first sentence:

"A Bernie Sanders White House would be $8 trillion in the hole over a decade."

Wow! $8 trillion in the hole, who would vote for that guy?

Okay, let's first ge...

"The I.M.F. Has No Real Role In Commenting on Monetary Policy"

Nope, that isn't the complaint of leftist agitators in Greece or Latin America, that is a comment from Axel A. Weber, who is identified in the NYT as "a former senior official at the European Central Bank who is now chairman of the investment bank UBS." This comment appears along with several other complaints from bankers about the I.M.F.'s support for low interest rates by the Fed, the European Central Bank, and other rich country central banks. Of course the I.M.F. comments on monetary poli...

Second Great Depression Silliness

Hey, we should all be thankful that Ben Bernanke saved us from a Second Great Depression and a Martian invasion. Yes, the Second Great Depression theory is being touted yet again, this time by Robert Samuelson. He tells us that unemployment would have soared to 25 percent without the bailout of the banks.

As I've written any number of times, neither Bernanke, Samuelson, or anyone else has said a word as to why a big stimulus package from the government would not have quickly gotten the econom...

David Brooks, Hillary Clinton, and the TPP

David Brooks is shocked, shocked to find out that political considerations might affect Hillary Clinton's stand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)in the presidential campaign. Brooks goes through the basic story. Yes, Clinton had been a supporter of the TPP in the Obama administration, but now Brooks tells us that Clinton has changed her position because  she'll say what "she needs to say now to become Bernie Sanders in a pantsuit."

Let me give a brief sidebar on the sexisim here. Ye...

Ben Bernanke on Not Seeing the Crisis

Ben Bernanke was on the Diane Rehm show on Tuesday (unsolicited plug: one of the most serious talk shows around). Anyhow, there was much good back and forth on the show. I will skip over most of what the former Fed chair said (here's my comment on saving Lehman), but I do want to address his response to the question of why the Fed didn't see the financial crisis coming. Here's the sequence:

"REHM It's remarkable that you said that the recent financial crisis was the worst in human history, ev...

Washington Post Discovers Rise In Labor Force Participation Among Japanese Women

The Washington Post deserves credit for being the first major media outlet to discover the sharp increase in women's labor force participation in Japan. It ran a piece headlined, "How American women fell behind Japanese women in the workplace," which pointed out that employment rates are now higher for women in Japan than for the United States. (The difference in employment rates would be even larger if the article focused on prime age (25-54) women.)

This shift has been clear in the OECD dat...

Timothy Geithner and the Auditors

Eduardo Porter had a good piece in the NYT pointing out the importance of having independent evaluations of government programs. The point is that the agencies undertaking a program have a strong incentive to exaggerate its benefits. He discusses this in the context of weatherization programs, but the problem applies more generally.

One of the areas noted by Porter is in the rating of mortgage backed securities (MBS). During the housing bubble years, the bond-rating agencies routinely gave in...