Dean Baker's Blog, page 341

Property Rights, Regulation, and Brain Dead Environmentalists

The company (incredibly named "Freedom Industries") responsible for the massive chemical spill in West Virginia that left hundreds of thousands of people without drinking water declared bankruptcy yesterday. This means that all of the people who had to suffer through days without water, and some who became seriously ill from drinking contaminated water, will likely not be compensated by this company for the damage it caused them.

Many people have referred to this spill as a failure of govern...

Rising Prices for Apparel: Good News for Workers?

Floyd Norris has an interesting piece showing that apparel prices are now rising more rapidly than other prices, after almost three decades in which they sharply trailed other prices. This is potentially very good news for most of the country's workers.

The forces at play here are the fall in the value of the dollar and the rise in wages in developing countries, most importantly China. While the availability of low-paid manufacturing workers in the developing world has placed severe downward...

David Brooks' Primitive Defense of the Rich

David Brooks is sweating hard trying to defend the one percent against the rest of the country and reality. His column today desperately warns readers:

"Some on the left have always tried to introduce a more class-conscious style of politics. These efforts never pan out. America has always done better, liberals have always done better, when we are all focused on opportunity and mobility, not inequality, on individual and family aspiration, not class-consciousness."

Funny, I thought Social Sec...

NPR Decides That the Federal Budget Is "Enormous"

This adjective appeared in a top of the hour news piece (sorry, no link) referring to the spending bill approved by Congress on Wednesday evening. It would be interesting to know how it made this assessment. While the government spends more money each year than any of its listeners will see in their lifetime, it spends less relative to the size of its economy than almost any other wealthy country. It is also spending less relative to the size of the economy than it did in the years 2009-2012....

The Austerians Take Over the NYT's News Pages: The Case of France

The New York Times news section praised the decision by French President François Hollande to cut social welfare spending and taxes in the same way that sports reporters trumpet the performance of the local team's quarterback. The article described the plan as moving in "a centrist direction" and said that "economic experts" were "gratified that Mr. Hollande finally seemed willing to wrestle with France’s intractable unemployment."

Really? Cutting spending when France's economy is still far b...

People Who Were Alive Through the Housing Bubble Do Not Consider Homeownership "a Way of Obtaining a Firm Financial Foothold"

The NYT had a piece on mortgage financing that was written as though the housing bubble and crash never occurred. It includes the incredible assertion that homeownership is considered a way to get a firm financial foothold as though there were not overwhelming evidence that this is often not the case. Even before the bubble, housing was often a volatile asset.

There are many markets where people have seen their house prices crash along with their local economy. For example many people in Detr...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Not a Free-Trade Agreement

I find "free-trade" twice in the text and once more in a quote in this short piece on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is an inaccurate characterization of the deal. Many parts of the deal have nothing to do with free trade; they are about setting regulatory standards. Some parts, like the section on patent and copyright protection, are about increasing protectionist barriers. This is 180 degrees at odds with free trade.

So what's the problem here? Why does the NYT feel the need to waste wor...

When Is the NYT Going to Start Putting Budget Numbers in Context?

David Leonhardt, the NYT's Washington editor, committed the paper several months ago to putting large numbers in context in response to a complaint raised by Public Editor Margaret Sullivan. There is still no evidence of this effort in the paper's budget reporting.

That is very clear in a piece today on the latest budget agreement in Congress. The article tells readers:

"The legislation also would impose new requirements for the Internal Revenue Service in reporting its activities to the publ...

For Obamacare It Matters If Enrollees Are Skewed by Health, Not Age

The NYT had yet another silly front page piece warning that Obamacare is about to go under, this time because not enough young people are signing up. If it keeps doing this, people will mistake it for a Jeff Bezos publication.

The point, which was shown in this Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, is that the age skewing really doesn't matter much for the success of the program. The fee structure of Obamacare is designed to somewhat favor older enrollees, but the gap is not very large. The Kais...

Robert Samuelson Gives Us Another Example of the Single-Parent Fallacy

This Monday morning's gift comes in a column discussing the state of battle in the War on Poverty. He tells readers:

"Worse, the breakdown of marriage and spread of single-parent households suggest that poverty may grow. From 1963 to 2012, the share of families with children under 18 headed by a single parent tripled to 32 percent. It’s 26 percent among whites, 34 percent among Hispanics and 59 percent among African Americans. Just why is murky. Low-income men may flunk as attractive marriage...