Dean Baker's Blog, page 336

The WSJ Wants to Blame Obamacare for Weak Hiring, but It's Not Quite Sure Why

The Wall Street Journal reported on the weak January jobs number. It's sure that Obamacare is somehow responsible, it just can't quite get a clear story together.

The article begins:

"A hiring chill hit the U.S. labor market for the second straight month in January, reflecting employers' reluctance to take on new workers despite some of the nation's strongest economic growth in years."

So the story is that the economy is growing rapidly, but firms for some reasons are not hiring workers. We g...

Seasonal Factors and Job Growth

Many people who should know better have been placing far too much emphasis on the weather as an explanation for weak economic data. Cold weather and snow do slow economic activity as people don't like to go shopping or to restaurants in sub-zero weather or blizzards. But cold weather and snow are normal parts of a winter in the Northeast-Midwest. This means their impact is already included in the seasonal adjustment factors for December and January.

The weather will only have an impact on the...

Extending Unemployment Benefits Would Increase Spending by 0.17 Percent

That's just in case you are like the vast majority of New York Times readers and have no clue how much $6 billion is. New York Times reporters do not have the ten seconds it takes to go to CEPR's Responsible Budget Reporting calculator and make their stories informative to readers.

NPR Tells Listeners That the Debt Is a "Huge Problem"

It's really great that we have National Public Radio. With the interest burden of the debt near a post-war low, and interest rates still at historically low levels, many of us might think that we could focus on other problems. (Netting out interest refunded by the Fed, interest payments are well below 1.0 percent of GDP.) After all, we have an economy that is still down close to 8 million jobs from trend levels, with long-term unemployment rates near post-World War II highs. As a result, mill...

Why Is Jeff Bezos' Paper Using Ageist Tripe to Push Wall Street Takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Ralph Nader is nearly 80 years old. And he is probably as sharp as anyone in Washington half of his age. So where does Linda DePillas get off implying that he is senile in his efforts to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from being eliminated? The piece begins:

"It's not often in Washington that you see wealthy, conservative investor types and their lawyers sitting down with professional affordable housing advocates. But on Wednesday morning, anti-corporate crusader Ralph Nader — now stoop...

Congressional Budget Office Increases Estimate of the Cost of Housing Bubble Collapse

While the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) projections of the impact of the Affordable Care Act got the most attention after the release of its new Budget and Economic Outlook, CBO also implicitly raised its estimate of the cost of the crisis created by the collapse of the housing bubble by $1.4 trillion. This is due to the fact that it downgraded its growth projections for later in the decade, for reasons unrelated to the ACA, with the view that more of the impact of the downturn will be...

Can Someone Get Dana Milbank to Read the Washington Post's Fact Checker Column?

If Dana Milbank had read this, he wouldn't have written something as silly and misinformed as this.

Frat Boy Budget Reporting at the NYT

The NYT was almost as bad as the Washington Post in its reporting on the farm bill. The NYT gets a few points for explaining how many people would be hit by the cuts in food stamps and what the cuts translated to in dollars per month.

But the main numbers still appeared as just really big numbers. No one knows what $1 trillion in spending means over the next decade and the article offers no context to provide meaning. So, this one will get a good humma, humma, humma, down at the budget repor...

Inequality and Mobility: Is the NYT Writing News Stories from Republican Talking Points?

That is what readers of a piece discussing President Obama's shift in emphasis from the word "inequality" to "opportunity" will undoubtedly think. The piece notes that President Obama is using the word "opportunity" more and downplaying talk of inequality. It presents comments from several people saying that "inequality" raises the specter of class war and that it eliminates the possibility of compromise with Republicans.

Incredibly the piece presents the Republicans' official line uncritical...

CBO Says Obamacare Will Raise Wages

Apparently a lot of media folks have made such a habit of repeating Republican talking points that they can't see what is right in front of their eyes. The Republicans are touting the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to reduce the number of people working.

Guess what? This was one of the motivations for the ACA. It is a feature, not a bug. There are a lot of people who would prefer not to work and would not work if they had some other way t...