Dean Baker's Blog, page 242

NYT Runs "Free Trade" Filler for TPP

The NYT apparently is doing its part to try to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Today it ran a piece warning people in its headline "failure of Obama's Trans-Pacific trade deal could hurt U.S. influence in Asia." The piece presented the views of a variety of individuals who said the failure of the TPP would damage the standing of the United States in the region.

Remarkably the piece did not include the views of anyone who had a different opinion. This is remarkable because we know fr...

David Brooks Warns of Economic Collapse and War Without TPP

The Washington chattering class is really upset that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) looks like it's going down. David Brooks pulls out all the stops today, using his NYT column to yell at "Tea Party" Democrats for not supporting the fast-track authority that would facilitate the passage of the TPP.

Unfortunately, Brooks was largely unarmed with facts when it came to the attack. To start, he tells readers;

"The North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, probably didn’t affect the A...

Is the Middle Class Better Off? Economists' Poor Logic on New Goods

Matt O'Brien treated us to a classic case of bad reasoning by economists. A survey of elite economists (you know, the type of people that couldn't see an $8 trillion housing bubble) found that the vast majority said that the official income data understated the increase in the standard of living for the middle class over the last 35 years.

The explanation for this view is that new goods like cell phones and the Internet have vastly improved our standard of living in ways that are not picked u...

Cheating: The Way Those Uber Wonder Boys Get Ahead

Wow, it's the sharing economy, everything is new and different. Hey, they don't have to pay the fees that those stupid old taxi companies do, because you order them on the Internet.

Sorry to be a bit negative early on a Monday morning, but I was just reading in the Washington Post that Uber is arguing that it should not have to pay the same fees as traditional taxi companies to pick people up at airports. Uber says the fees are too high.

I have no strong opinion about the size of these fees,...

How Does the TPP Improve People's Lives by Raising the Cost of Drugs and Making Them Pay More for Old Movies and Music?

That's what folks are asking after reading Peter Baker's "news analysis" that told readers the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP):

"was a way to leave behind a positive legacy abroad, one that could be measured, he hoped, by the number of lives improved rather than by the number of bodies left behind."

The discussion implies that the TPP is a way to pull together the countries of East Asia as allies. However, one of the main purposes of the TPP is to create stronger and longer patent and copyrig...

Financial Transactions Taxes and Logic 101 for Fred Hiatt

I've been speaking and writing on financial transactions taxes for close to a quarter century. Most people don't find the concept that difficult to understand, but apparently Fred Hiatt does. In a column bemoaning the sidetracking of Obamanomics, Hiatt tells readers that Obama:

"has a targeted version of the left’s beloved financial transactions tax, too: a levy on the largest banks proportional to the riskiness of their liabilities."

Actually the bank tax has nothing to do with a financial t...

Protectionist Pact Crashes: House Votes Down Fast-Track Authority

The media seem to be getting better about referring to the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a "free-trade" agreement. Many articles now refer to it more neutrally as a "trade pact." The Washington Post sort of split the difference today in describing it as a "a sweeping free-trade and regulatory pact," but this still requires some further push back.

We know that the TPP will increase patent and copyright protections. These protections cover a large portion of the economy, most importantly prescri...

Damn, China Has Too Few People Again

Regular readers of the NYT opinion pages must really be wondering what is going on in China. Just a few days ago the paper ran a piece giving us the terrible news that robots are taking all the jobs. According to a column by Martin Ford, China is rapidly bringing robots into its factories, leading to massive displacement of manufacturing workers. Ford tells readers:

"Chinese factory jobs may thus be poised to evaporate at an even faster pace than has been the case in the United States and oth...

Hot Dogs and the Minimum Wage

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece headlined, "as minimum wages rise, small firms get squeezed." Most readers probably would expect a story of how small businesses are being hit by higher minimum wages. But the business that provides the framing for the story doesn't seem to fit the bill at all:

"Hannah Joseph dreams of bringing gourmet grilled hot dogs to food lovers coast to coast. But she now rules out owning any new restaurants beyond the two she and her husband currently operate in Indi...

Ebola and How Patent Protection Impedes Innovation

The NYT has a fascinating piece on how a Chinese drug company appears to have developed a successful treatment for Ebola, the use of which is being threatened by U.S. researchers complaining about patent infringement. The basic story is that the Chinese company used information in a U.S. patent to help develop their drug, which appears to be an effective treatment for Ebola. The patent holders are now upset that the Chinese company is making their drug widely available to Ebola victims, in so...