Dean Baker's Blog, page 331

NPR Tells US That Pew Expert Paul Taylor Wants to Promote Generational Conflict

In the last three decades the rich have gotten the bulk of the benefits of economic growth, as those at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution have seen little improvement in living standards. This naturally leads many people to want to reverse the policies that have led to this upward redistribution, such as high unemployment, a trade policy that protects high end workers, while subjecting the middle and bottom to international competition, government subsidies to too big to fail ban...

That $60 Billion Increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit Is Equal to 0.14 Percent of Spending

Of course most NYT readers are well aware of the fact that the government is projected to spend around $48.5 trillion over the next decade, so they realized that President Obama's proposal to spend $60 billion more on the Earned Income Tax Credit is no big deal in terms of overall spending. That's why this NYT article saw no reason to put the number in any context. However for that tiny group of readers who don't have the total budget in their heads and may have thought this proposal would be...

January Spending Was Driven by Health Care

There was a larger than normal jump in spending on consumer services reported for January. The Reuters article attributed this to weather driven increases in spending on heating.

Actually the biggest rise in spending on services in January was for health care. The Commerce Department showed the annual rate of spending increased by $30.5 billion in January. This amounted to a 1.6 percent increase in spending compared with December. This is an extraordinary rate of increase, especially consider...

Robert Samuelson's Bad Math on Generational Equity

Yes, it's Monday morning and Robert Samuelson again complains we are being cruel to our children. As in the past, he is not bothered by the likelihood that we will hand them a planet badly damaged by global warming. Nor is he upset that we might hand them a country in which the rules are rigged to give the rich a hugely disproportionate share of national income.

Nope, this is the Washington Post. He is upset that seniors will be getting Social Security checks averaging $1,500-$1,600 a month....

Arthur Brooks Is Upset that Some Folks Don't Like the Government Redistributing Income Upward

Brooks tells us that people who are unhappy about the enormous upward redistribution of the last three decades are guilty of the sin of envy. Let's try an alternative hypothesis, large segments of the public are angry because the wealthy are rigging the rules so that an ever larger share of the piece gets redistributed to their pockets.

There are a large number of well-documented ways in which they have engineered this heist. For example, they have too big to fail insurance that transfers ten...

Washington Post Discovers that CBO Is Not God

The Washington Post is widely known as the newspaper that uses both its opinion and news pages to constantly tell readers that we have to cut Social Security and Medicare spending because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts big deficits 10, 20, or 30 years in the future. That is why it was extraordinary to see an article in the Sunday paper telling readers that CBO is often wrong and that its scores may not always be the best basis for policy decisions.

The central theme of the pi...

Venezuelans Do Not Pay for Their Goods in Dollars

A NYT article discussing class divisions in Venezuela included a chart showing an implicit rate of inflation calculated by the Cato Institute. The chart shows an annual rate of inflation of more than 300 percent, compared to an official rate of around 50 percent.

The basis for the difference is that the Cato rate effectively assumes that items are paid for in dollars. As the black market price of Venezuela's currency plunges against the dollar, this leads to a very high measure of inflation....

Ruth Marcus KNOWS That We Can Never Raise Taxes to Pay for Social Security

It's pretty impressive to be able to know something about the future when all the evidence suggests the opposite. Washington Post columnist apparently knows that we will never be able to raise additional revenue to cover Social Security's projected shortfalls. That is the only way we can explain her assertion (expressed in euphemisms) that we have to cut Social Security benefits now to:

"protect those most in need of generous benefits."

Of course the evidence shows that the public has been in...

The Congressional Budget Office Doesn't Believe Robots Will Take Our Jobs

The elite policy types in the United States are truly extraordinary in their ability to show great concern about completely contradictory possible states of the world. Floyd Norris shows one of the bases for serious hand wringing, higher future budget deficits, as projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in its latest outlook. Norris points out that the report assumes that the weak economic growth of recent years persists long into the future. (Norris notes CBO has badly erred befor...

Camp Bank Tax

My friend Jared Bernstein makes many of the right points on the Camp tax reform proposal, but let me add a few.

First, it is good to see the proposal for taxing the large banks. The logic is that these banks are benefiting from implicit government guarantees through too big to fail insurance, which the tax would in part offset. The problem is that the tax is an order of magnitude too small.

The tax is projected to raises $64 billion over a decade. By comparison, Bloomberg News estimated the...