Dean Baker's Blog, page 327

The Government's Role in Blocking Access to Health Care

The Washington Post had a major piece that discussed the ethics of efforts to use public pressure to force drug companies to make expensive drugs available to patients at affordable prices. Remarkably it never discussed the role of patent monopolies.

In the case that was the immediate focus of the article, a young boy who was suffering from cancer and seemed likely to benefit from a drug that was still in the experimental stage, it does not appear that patent protection was a major factor. Ho...

Greg Mankiw: When the Columnist Misframes the Issue

In his column "when the scientist is also a philosopher," Greg Mankiw tells us about his preference for not having the government interfere in consensual exchanges between individuals. He warns readers that economists who advocate such interventions also have a political philosophy about achieving certain outcomes (i.e. less inequality).

The wisdom of not interfering with consensual exchanges implies that is possible to have exchanges in which the government has not already played a huge role...

Nonsense on the Housing Market Makes Page One at WaPo

The Post gives us its latest concern about the housing market, telling us that higher interest rates will cause people to stay in their current homes where they have locked in low mortgage rates for long periods of time.

"The higher rates, soaring home prices and a tight inventory have kept potential buyers on the sidelines, hurting the sales of previously owned homes and undermining the recovery of the housing market, a huge contributor to economic growth."

The problem with this line is tha...

George Will: A Man Impervious to the Evidence In His Own Column

There are many ideologues who have their own set of truths, who refuse to listen to any evidence that points in a different direction. However George Will is in a class all by himself. He refuses to pay attention to the evidence that he himself puts forward.

Exhibit A is a classic Will rant at the left for being unwilling to consider the cultural factors that affect poverty. The hero of this piece is Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

"In March 1965, Moynihan, then 37 and assistant secretary of labor,...

Sam Nunn

 

Directorships, 2008-2012: 5

Total director compensation, 2008-2012: $4,579,315

Average annual director compensation, 2008-2012: $915,863

Average compensation per full year of service as director: $274,321

Sam Nunn served as a U.S. Senator from Georgia for 24 years, from 1972 to 1996, during which he served as chairman of the Armed Services Committee and on the Intelligence and Small Business Committees. Before his election to the Senate, Nunn served in the House of Representatives for...

Silly Yellen Bashing at the WaPo

The campaign to install Larry Summers instead of Janet Yellen as Fed chair was chock full of sexist innuendo as pundits speculated as to whether Yellen had the gravitas to hold down the job. The Washington Post's editorial on Yellen's first press conference showed that such attitudes continue in elite Washington circles.

The headline complained:

"In Fed media event, Yellen isn't able to control the message."

The piece itself told readers:

"Mr. Bernanke’s successor, Janet Yellen, met with repo...

The Health Care Exchanges Need Healthy People, It Doesn't Matter If They Are Young, #65,412

How can we stop the country's leading newspaper from repeating nonsense? To paraphrase a former president, "there they go again." A front page article on the Obama administration's efforts to sign up young people before the deadline told readers:

"And there is concern that the administration still needs a larger proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds, the young and presumably healthy people whom insurance companies need as customers in order to keep premiums reasonable for everyone."

The simple fa...

Can We Kill the "Young Invincibles" Story?

Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle gives us yet another rendition of the story of young invincibles killing Obamacare, (literally, it is the headline of the piece). Remarkably, the column actually notes the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis showing that young invincibles really don't matter much for the program. This analysis points out that because young people pay much less in premiums than older people, it really doesn't matter much whether they don't sign up in proportion to their pop...

China Isn't as Rich as They Say, and Making U.S. Workers Poorer Didn't Help

In a piece discussing patterns in world growth over the last three decades Eduardo Porter told NYT readers:

"What’s happened is that while income growth stalled for middle-class workers in developed countries and surged for people in the 1 percent, it also grew sharply for hundreds of millions of workers in China, India and other Asian countries. In the late 1980s, for instance, workers in the middle of China’s urban income distribution made 56 percent of the median American income, according...

Nate Silver Gets the Story Partly Right on Social Security and Medicare

In his new and improved FiveThirtyEight Nate Silver examines the sources of increases in government spending over recent decades and identifies Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as the culprits. He then notes that these are effectively insurance programs. He then concludes that this explains the decline in trust for government:

"Nevertheless, the declining level of trust in government since the 1970s is a fairly close mirror for the growth in spending on social insurance as a share of t...