Dean Baker's Blog, page 408

Washington Post Does Front Page Sales Pitch for Trade Agreements, Again

The Washington Post just loves the trade agreements that recent administrations have been pursuing. It is willing to abandon all journalistic standards to help promote them. Post fans may remember back in 2007 when a lead editorial claimed that Mexico's GDP had quadrupled over the prior two decades in an editorial touting the benefits of NAFTA. (Mexico's actual growth over this period was 83 percent.)

Anyhow, it's back in the trade agreement promotion business with a front page article that t...

February Employment Right in Line with Prior Two Years

I hate to spoil the party over the big February jobs numbers, but I guess I've always been more of a data geek than a party guy. Yes, 236,000 is better than expected and not a bad number in the scheme of things. But folks with a little bit of memory would be slower to bring out the champagne bottles. We created 271,000 jobs last February and 196,000 jobs in February of 2011. That makes the average for the prior two years 234,000, almost exactly the same as yesterday's job number.

Last year th...

Matt Yglesias' Important Point

Matt Yglesias is on the money when he points out that when progressives want workers to get more money, they must implicitly want someone else to get less. Now there is a real real big exception to this point, that being the current economic slump. In a context where the economy is producing at a rate that is around 6 percent (@ $1 trillion) below its potential, then we can literally talk about a situation in which we expand the pie and there is more for everyone.

This is why the concern abou...

Joe Scarborough Carries His Deficit Rope-a-Dope to the Next Level (see addendum)

Joe Scarborough is apparently feeling emboldened by his exchange with Paul Krugman on the Charlie Rose show and is doubling down on his confused anti-deficit tirades. He is back with an oped in the Post, co-authored with Jeffrey Sachs, who should know better.

The piece is a cornucopia of confusion, beginning with the first sentence:

"Dick Cheney and Paul Krugman have declared from opposite sides of the ideological divide that deficits don’t matter, but they simply have it wrong."

I am not in...

Joe Scarborough Carries His Deficit Rope-a-Dope to the Next Level

Joe Scarborough is apparently feeling emboldened by his exchange with Paul Krugman on the Charlie Rose show and is doubling down on his confused anti-deficit tirades. He is back with an oped in the Post, co-authored with Jeffrey Sachs, who should know better.

The piece is a cornucopia of confusion, beginning with the first sentence:

"Dick Cheney and Paul Krugman have declared from opposite sides of the ideological divide that deficits don’t matter, but they simply have it wrong."

I am not in...

Washington Post Runs Front Page Piece Challenging Demographic Horror Story and Doesn't Even Know It

The Washington Post had a front page piece today warning that the spread of robots in the workplace may displace large numbers of workers. Incredibly, the piece never once mentions the implication of the displacement story for the demographic nightmare stories that endlessly fill its news and opinion pages.

Remember, the demographic nightmare story is that because of lower birth rates and longer life expectancies we are going to see a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees, from 3 to 1 toda...

Glenn Kessler Gets It Mostly Right on Budget History

Glenn Kessler used his Factcheck column to take Senator Barbara Boxer to task for giving the Democrats' credit for the budget surpluses at the end of the Clinton administration. Kessler rightly points out that the spending cuts and tax increases put in place by the Clinton administration would not have moved the budget to a surplus had it not been for the boom that was driven by the stock bubble. I have made the same point in other contexts.

There is one important part of the picture that Kes...

Great Piece by Thomas Edsall on Social Security

This one should be mandatory reading for reporters as well as anyone else who comments on the topic.

Rise in Vacancy Rates Due to Employers Being Choosy

The NYT has a good piece on new research that finds employers are being far more selective in their hiring. The research finds that employers are willing to interview more people and take longer in the process now than in the past.

This research is very useful because it helps to explain a seeming anomaly in the data. There had been a clear rightward shift in the Beveridge Curve in recent years, showing that there were more job vacancies at the same level of unemployment. This would often be...

Correcting Brad DeLong on the Housing Bubble

I see that Brad has a post saying that the economy was adjusting nicely to the bursting of the housing bubble until the financial crisis set in. He notes that housing construction fell by 2.5 percentage points of GDP between 2005 and 2008. This was replaced by an increase in gross exports of 2.0 pp of GDP and increase in equipment investment of 0.5 pp. Everything was moving along nicely until the financial crisis in 2008.

I see things a bit differently. First, gross exports don't create jobs,...