Dean Baker's Blog, page 407

Are Developed Countries Really Waiting for 1.6 Billion People in China to Start Buying More?

That's what the Washington Post told readers. There is a small problem here since China only has 1.35 billion people. Buy hey, what 250 million people more or less when you're the Washington Post.

(Typo corrected -- thanks Kat.)

Correction to the NYT Correction on Cuomo Jobs Record

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been bragging about job growth on his watch. The NYT has a piece challenging Cuomo's claims. It tells readers:

"The number of private-sector jobs increased by 4 percent in New York State from January 2011 to January 2013, according to the State Labor Department. Nationwide, over the same period, private sector jobs grew by 4.4 percent.

"Those figures come despite the fact that New York State lost fewer jobs, as a percentage, than the nation did in the Great...

When Will Glenn Kessler Question the Counterfactuals of the Deficit Hawks?

Glenn Kessler has been doing a good job scrutinizing the claims of horrors of sequester in his job as the Washington Post fact checker. For example, in this piece on the Obama administration's claim of the number of children who would be denied vaccines because of the sequester, he questions how many otherwise would have gotten vaccines and whether there were sources of flexibility in the program's funding that would allow vaccines to continue to be offered to eligible children.

These are rea...

Impact of the Housing Crash on Consumption

Bruce Bartlett has an interesting blog post in the NYT talking about changes in patterns of wealth distribution in recent years. Bartlett points out that the recent rise in the stock market is likely to provide little benefit to most middle income families since they have little, if any, wealth in the stock market. By contrast, the value of the housing stock is still far below its pre-recession level, at $17.7 trillion at the end of 2012 compared to a peak of $22.7 trillion in 2006. Bartlett...

The Prosecution of Arthur Anderson Did Not Reduce Employment in the Accounting Industry by 28,000

Andrew Ross Sorkin's piece arguing against the prosecution of large banks and other large companies might have led readers to believe that 28,000 people were out of work as a result of Arthur Anderson's bankruptcy, following its prosecution. Of course this is not true.

There is no reason to believe that the demand for accounting services fell as a result of Arthur Anderson's prosecution. While the people who had been working at Arthur Anderson lost their jobs when the company folded, the comp...

Not Everyone Has Seen the Same Gain in Life Expectancy

The Post has a nice piece pointing out the disparities in life expectancy by income. As a result of these differences, proposals to raise the age of Social Security eligibility would disproportionately hit lower income workers.

At one point the piece tells readers:

"Advocates of raising the retirement age say only a relative handful of older workers would be harmed and that the vulnerable could be protected by enacting hardship exemptions."

It would have been worth noting that this practice o...

Moderate Deflation Is Just an Inflation Rate That Is Too Low

Zero holds a bizarre place in policy debates. In the United States we have many policy types who seem to worship a balanced budget. At the start of the last decade there was a modest clamoring on the right for a monetary policy targeting zero inflation. In the same vein we continue to see assertions that deflation would pose some inordinate problem, as though something awful happens when the change in the aggregate price level turns negative.

The culprit today is the NYT, which has an article...

Medicare Doesn't Make Health Care Industry Lobbyists Disappear

The Washington Post once again left its readers stumped. It printed an op-ed column by David Goldhill, the president and CEO of the Game Show Network, the main point of which seems to be that Medicare must still confront rent-seeking by health care providers.

Goldhill apparently is arguing against the merits of expanding Medicare or adopting a single payer type system in the United States, telling readers:

"Single-payer advocates contend that other nations have managed to better control healt...

What Income Level Does the NYT Consider "Affluent?"

A NYT piece discussing the prospects of another budget deal would have benefited enormously by answering this question. The piece referred to a proposal to restructure Medicare under which the government, "could potentially charge the affluent elderly more."

The definition of "affluent" matters enormously. When it came to raising taxes, President Obama and the Republican leadership agreed not to raise taxes for couples earning less than $450,000 a year. If this same definition of "affluent" i...

The Strange Attack of Jeffrey Sachs on Paul Krugman

In a Huffington Post column today Jeffrey Sachs picks up where he left off in a co-authored column with Joe Scarborough that appeared in the Post last week. There are two main threads to Sachs' argument. The first is that we would have been much better off with an ambituous public investment agenda than the actual stimulus package that was passed by Congress. The second is that we would have been better doing nothing than getting a stimulus of the sort we got, or even worse, getting a larger...