Dean Baker's Blog, page 344

Washington Post Runs Front Page Piece Exposing Wasteful Program Costing 0.00008 Percent of Federal Budget

Yes, the investigative team at the Washington Post is back on the trail. Today's front page expose highlights a government program that uses 0.00008 percent of the federal budget to promote the health benefits of walnuts. The piece tells readers that this program is a "hard not to crack." It explained that even though Representative Tom McClintock pushed to kill the program; Congress voted 322-98 to keep it, claiming that it provided benefits to farmers.

Of course this is not the only example...

Economists Work for Money: Those Who Defend Wall Street Profit from It

The NYT had a good piece explaining how some of the financial industry's biggest defenders in academia are paid by the industry for their work.

Interest Rates Will "Begin" to Rise: NYT Gives Pretty Questionable Investment Advice

Paul Sullivan gave NYT readers some pretty bizarre investment advice in his "Wealth Matters" column. He noted the Fed's announcement that it would begin to cut back on its quantitative easing (QE) program, telling readers:

"Bonds are one area of concern. Since interest rates on fixed income, particularly benchmarks like 10-year United States Treasury notes, fell so much over the last few years, the view is they will begin to rise as the Fed ends its bond-buying program and the economy improve...

NPR Failed to Correct President Obama's Error: Net Exports Have Not Been a Boost to the Economy in 2013

Morning Edition had a segment on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and EU-U.S. trade agreement today. The piece began with a speech by President Obama in which he asserted that exports have been one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy. This is not true in any meaningful sense.

What matters for the economy is net exports, not exports alone. If GM shuts down an auto assembly plant in Ohio and replaces it with one in Mexico, which then ships the cars back to the United States, this would s...

Washington Post Reports on How Greedy Geezers Are Stealing from the Young

The Washington Post had a good investigative piece on how for profit hospice-care providers are increasing their profits by admitting people for hospice care who are not actually dying. These people are far more profitable for the companies since they are likely to be receiving hospice care for a longer period of time and require less care than someone who is actually dying. Medicare and Medicaid pick up most of the cost of this care.

In the accounts of spending on the elderly that the Washin...

WaPo Turns Reality on Its Head: Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Not About Freer Flow of Commerce

The Washington Post just loves anything that is labeled as a free trade agreement. (I'm going to call my old car a "free trade agreement" and sell it to the Post for a fortune.) Today it ran a piece on the Trans-Pacific Partnership that had the sub-head:

"goal of talks with Pacific region is a freer flow of world commerce."

While this is also asserted in the article itself, it is not true as the article makes clear. One of the main purposes of the deal is strengthening patent and copyright p...

Washington Post Didn't Get the Memo: Health Care Exchanges Don't Need Young People

It's hard to get news over at Fox on 15th Street, buried away in downtown Washington, five blocks from the White House. That presumably is why the Washington Post had a front page article discussing the extent to which young people are signing for the health care exchanges set up under Obamacare. The piece reports on the outreach effort to sign up:

"the healthy Americans in their 20s and 30s who are key to making the economics of the new health-care law work."

In fact there is not a special n...

Robots and Economic Luddites: They Aren't Taking Our Jobs Quickly Enough

Lydia DePillis warns us in the Post of 8 ways that robots will take our jobs. It is amazing how the media have managed to hype the fear of robots taking our jobs at the same time that they have built up fears over huge budget deficits bankrupting the country. You don't see the connection? Maybe you should be an economics reporter for a leading national news outlet.

Okay, let's get to basics. The robots taking our jobs story is a story of labor surplus, too many workers, too few jobs. Everythi...

Paul Krugman Was Right About Bitcoin and I Said It First

Timothy Lee says that Paul Krugman got it wrong about the resources being wasted in the process of bitcoin mining. Krugman wrote a column based on a NYT piece about a massive bank of computers located in Iceland (low cost electricity) that is devoted to developing complex algorithms that allow the owners to get a large share of newly minted bitcoins.

Lee's complaint against Krugman is that this mining is actually part of the Bitcoin transactions process. The correct answer to Lee is, so what?...

When It Comes to Bashing Obamacare They Just Make Things Up at the WSJ

When people just start making things up it usually means that they don't have much of an argument. That appears to be the case with the bashers of Obamacare over at the Wall Street Journal.

Robert Grady, a managing director of a private equity company and top adviser to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told readers:

"For most of this year, the overwhelming majority of jobs added to the U.S. economy have been part-time, not full-time. Gallup's payroll-to-population ratio, the proportion of...