Dean Baker's Blog, page 25

Are Red State Governors Getting Their People Killed to Help Donald Trump’s Re-Election Chances?

This is an incredibly ghoulish question that would be absurd to ask in normal times. But these are not normal times. We know Donald Trump has staffed the top levels of his administration with people who unhesitatingly put Donald Trump’s political prospects above the well-being of the people. It is certainly plausible that Republican governors have similar priorities.

A simple test for the governors is to look at their positive test rates for the coronavirus. Test rates are a good measure of how ...

Are Red State Governors Getting Their People Killed to Help Donald Trump’s Re-election Chances?

This is an incredibly ghoulish question that would be absurd to ask in normal times. But these are not normal times. We know Donald Trump has staffed the top levels of his administration with people who unhesitatingly put Donald Trump’s political prospects above the well-being of the people. It is certainly plausible that Republican governors have similar priorities.

A simple test for the governors is to look at their positive test rates for the coronavirus. Test rates are a good measure of how ...

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: Even More than Klein and Pettis Say

I have long enjoyed reading Matthew Klein’s columns in the Financial Times and elsewhere. They are invariably insightful and I have learned much from them. I am less familiar with Michael Pettis’ work, but I have liked what I have read. Therefore, I expected a lot from their book, Trade Wars are Class Wars, and I was not disappointed.

The basic point is that the major trade imbalances in the world over the last four decades have been driven by the suppression of wage growth, with income being re...

Robert Samuelson Hangs It Up

Robert Samuelson, the Washington Post columnist who has provided so much material for this blog over the years, announced his retirement today. I’ll take this opportunity to agree with a couple of points he made in his final column.

Samuelson notes the work that Treasury secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, along with Federal Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke did to combat the Great Recession, and then says “but that doesn’t excuse their failure to anticipate the housing boom and to pr...

Is Repealing Section 230 the Way to Fix Facebook? Exchange with Siva Vaidhyanathan

This is the first part of a four part exchange with Siva Vaidhyanthan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia. Professor Vaidhyanathan will write a response. I will then draft a rejoinder and he will get the last word.

 

Repeal Section 230 to Fix Facebook

Many people are worried that Facebook is playing the same role in the 2020 election that it did in the 2016 election, acting as a conduit for massive amounts of false and misleading information. They hope that Mark Zuckerber...

Blue States are Not Wrong to Want to Restore the Deduction for State and Local Taxes

Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam had a New York Times column complaining that Democrats want to restore the full deductibility for state and local income taxes, which was ended with the 2017 tax cut bill. They claim, rightly, that the vast majority of this deduction goes to rich people.

While that is true, the point is that ending the deduction means that rich people in blue states now face much higher tax rates. This gives them more incentive to not live in blue states. To get an idea o...

It Was Not “Flaws in the U.S. Financial System” that Caused the Great Recession, It Was the Collapse of the Housing Bubble

Our elites work hard to cover up for each other even if it means an almost Trumpian denial of reality. We got another taste of this effort in a New York Times piece on Joe Biden’s actions with regard to China over the years. The piece talks about the massive job loss of manufacturing jobs due to trade in China and then tells us the problem of the Great Recession was about the financial system:

“From 1999 to 2011, competition from China cost the United States more than two million factory jobs, a...

The U.S., China, and the New Cold Warriors

On the days when he is not celebrating his friendship and trade deals with China’s president Xi Jinping, Donald Trump has sought to hype China as the United States’ major enemy in the world. This has meant not only absurd allegations about the pandemic (top Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro has claimed that China deliberately sent infected people to the U.S. to spread the virus and damage the U.S. economy), but also sanctions, tariffs, and hints of military confrontations. While much of this ...

Do Most Economists Think Government Deficits Should Have Been Lower Before the Pandemic Hit?

Washington Post reporter Heather Long has a series of useful charts comparing the economy’s performance  under Presidents Obama and Trump. Most of the discussion is quite good, but one item that raised my eyebrow was in the section on deficits, where it told readers:

“Many economists say the bulge in spending after the Great Recession and pandemic recession were necessary and unavoidable, but they fault Obama and Trump for not doing more to right the federal budget during the good economic years...

New York Times Again Forgets to Mention the Foolproof Way to Prevent Foreign Governments from Stealing Vaccine Research

Of course that would be having open research that was freely shared. That would immediately make theft impossible, since there would be nothing to steal.

This simple and obvious point is not mentioned once in a piece describing efforts by Russia and China to gain access to vaccine research being done at U.S. universities and private companies. Since the whole world is struggling to get a vaccine as quickly as possible to bring the pandemic under control, it might have made sense to have a cooper...