Dean Baker's Blog, page 270

Is That $224 Billion Over One Year or Ten Years?

That's what millions of readers of Ron Haskins' column in the NYT on designing effective social programs will be asking. The column tells readers:

"When John M. Bridgeland led Mr. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council, he was amazed to find 339 federal programs for disadvantaged youth, administered by 12 departments and agencies, at a cost of $224 billion."

The piece doesn't indicate whether this spending is for one or ten years. (My guess is the latter, but I'm not really sure without looking at th...

It Is Important That Women Can Combine Work and Family Obligations, We Don't Need More Kids: Japan Edition

The it's hard to get good help crowd keep trying to push the bizarre line that the world is running out of people. This theme appears in a NYT piece on Japan's efforts to end gender discrimination in the work place and to make it easier for women to hold on to jobs as they raise children. For example, it tells readers:

"The national birthrate is just 1.4 children per woman, among the lowest in the world and well below the level needed to ward off a sharp decline in population in the coming de...

Frank Bruni Thinks The Rich Get Their Money from Social Security and Medicare

That's what readers of his column on Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo would likely conclude. The column has the subhead, "Gina Raimondo's approach to income inequality."

There is not much in the piece that directly addresses income inequality as most of us would think about it. The piece highlights Raimondo's cuts to the pensions of public sector workers. This is not a group of people that ordinarily is considered to be among the rich. While the piece tells us that she "framed the cutbacks...

The Dead Young Invincibles: Obamacare Needs Healthy People, the Older the Better

The NYT apparently still doesn't know that the young invincibles are dead. The idea that Obamacare needed young healthy people to enroll is one of the big myths that was killed in 2014. For the economics of the system to work, it needs healthy people to sign up. It is actually better for the system if they are older and healthy than younger and healthy because older people pay higher premiums.

Unfortunately the NYT is still confused on this basic point. In an article reporting on the situatio...

What's the Approval Rating for Obamacare Among People Who Don't Believe in Death Panels?

That's a question millions are asking after seeing the results of a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that showed that 41 percent of the public believes the Affordable Care Act created

"a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare."

An equal number knew that no such panel existed and the rest didn't know. If we assume that support for Obamacare among the 41 percent who believe in death panels is in the single digits, then support among the people who know th...

Actually, Income Growth for the Middle Class Is No Mystery

A NYT article on efforts to overcome stagnating incomes for the middle class bizarrely skipped over the most obvious and proven method: low unemployment. The problem shows up in the very first sentence, which tells readers:

"For average American families, the United States economy is like a football team that cannot move the ball, and has not been able to for 30 years."

Actually, the football team moved the ball very well in the years from 1996 to 2001, when families at middle and bottom of t...

Robert Samuelson Thinks That Because He Is Confused About the Economy, Everyone Else Is Also

Robert Samuelson has a really serious problem of projecting his own conceptual confusions on others. In his column this morning he repeatedly uses "we" when he actually means "I."

"We overestimated our ability to control the economic environment. What we have learned is that outside events — here, the financial crisis and Great Recession — can overwhelm collective protections and discredit conventional beliefs. The economy is more random, unstable and insecure than we imagined. It is less sus...

Creative Arithmetic In Support of Reaganism at the Washington Post

Many newspapers require that people writing columns carefully document the factual claims they make. The Washington Post is not in this category as readers of Steve Moore's column touting the wisdom of the Laffer Curve must know. I won't go into the details of the misrepresentations in the piece. Paul Krugman has done some of this work here, and PGL at Econospeak adds more.

I will just make a couple of quick additional points. First, no one ever disputed that high tax rates have a negative i...

News for Washington Post: Politicians Don't Always Tell the Truth and TPP Is Not a Free-Trade Agreement

People in places like rural Kansas and downtown Washington, DC often have a misplaced trust in authority and elected officials. They are inclined to take their comments at face value, not realizing that these people often have ulterior motives.

The Washington Post gave us an example of this confusion in a front page article on President Obama's effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which it repeatedly refers to as a "free-trade" pact. The piece follows the administration's line...

More Confusion on Inflation: Lower Oil Prices Helps, Rather than Hurts Japan

Confused thinking on inflation continues to abound, and not just from the folks convinced that hyper-inflation is just around the corner or already here. Recall that until recently we were supposed to be terrified that those low inflation rates in the euro zone might shift from being small positives to small negatives, and then the world would end.

Fortunately the I.M.F., among others, is now pointing out that the problem is simply an inflation rate that is too low. An inflation rate of -0.5...