Dean Baker's Blog, page 436

Washington Post Abandons More Journalistic Norms In Push to Cut Social Security and Medicare

The Washington Post is intensifying its push for cuts to Social Security and Medicare apparently hoping for action in the lame duck Congressional session. Today a story in the news section told readers:

"On entitlements, Obama has offered significant changes to Medicare, including letting the eligibility age to rise from 65 to 67."

The passive tense in this sentence might confuse readers. President Obama proposed raising the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 67. This is not something th...

Would the NYT Allow Oped Columnists to Blame Global Warming on Social Security?

It is fashionable in elite circles to talk say that the aging of the population will bankrupt the country as a result of the higher costs it will impose on Social Security and Medicare (referred to as "entitlements.") It makes you seem a knowledgeable and concerned person to issue dire warnings along these lines.

Of course it is utter nonsense as everyone familiar with the projections knows. The projected rise in Social Security spending due to aging would increase the annual cost of the prog...

When Did Growth in South Korea Plummet?

The NYT has an article that discussed the possibility that China's economy will be less focused on investment and more focused on consumption and improving the quality of life of the Chinese people. It notes the extraordinary share of GDP in China that is devoted to investment and includes a graph that shows in the the 1980s both Japan and South Korea also had an extraordinary share of GDP devoted to investment. It then tells readers that:

"Growth in Japan and South Korea started to slow and...

Noam Scheiber's NYT Book Review Asks Us to Imagine That Someone Using Data Had Warned of the Housing Bubble

It's best to ignore personal slights in Washington and elsewhere, but this one goes beyond my personal feelings. In a review of Nate Silver's new book, Noam Scheiber notes the effectiveness with which Silver uses data to analyze a wide range of policy issues and then tells us:

"it’s not hard to imagine Silver and his ilk one day letting the air out of an inflating housing bubble."

Yeah, right. It shouldn't be too hard to imagine since that is what some of us were trying to do from 2002 onward...

Michael Gerson Has Trouble with Numbers and Is Jealous of Those Who Don't

Michael Gerson used his column today to make a bizarre attack on the NYT's polling analyst Nate Silver. He complains to readers:

"Silver’s prediction is not an innovation; it is trend taken to its absurd extreme. He is doing little more than weighting and aggregating state polls and combining them with various historical assumptions to project a future outcome to project a future outcome with exaggerated, attention-grabbing exactitude. His work is better summarized as an 86.3 percent confiden...

Robert Samuelson Goes Way Overboard in Getting it Wrong on the Economy

Robert Samuelson sounds like he is really angry at American voters since it doesn't look like they are following his advice. He therefore pulls out all the stops in misrepresenting the country's economic situation in his column today.

He starts quickly, telling us in the second paragraph:

"There’s a triple threat to stronger economic growth. The first stems from the legacy of the 2007-09 financial crisis, which induced households and companies to shed debt and, more important, made both more...

Washington Post Continues Effort to Pressure Obama to Cut Budget Deal Before End of Year

The Washington Post has repeatedly used its news section (e.g here and here) to hype fears about the budget dispute that it likes to call the "fiscal cliff." (Since the actual impact of waiting until after the end of the year to reach a deal is minor, most objective commentators would not use the term "cliff" to refer to the deadline.) If the consequences of waiting until after the end of the year to make a deal, when the politics shift to President Obama's favor, can be portrayed as sufficie...

Steven Davidoff Whitewashes the Investment Banks in the NYT

Steven Davidoff used a Dealbook column to defend the investment banks behavior in selling collaterized debt obligations (CDOs) filled with bad mortgages. While he does make an important point, he glides over some clearly improper and possibly illegal behavior on the part of the banks.

Davidoff notes that the CDOs in question were sold to people who certainly should have been sophisticated investors and who were clearly warned that Goldman Sachs and other banks were not acting as investment ad...

Thomas Friedman Thinks the Heritage Foundation Is a Left-Wing Outfit

That's what readers of his column today would inevitably conclude. After all, Friedman called President Obama's support of the health care reform plan pushed by the Heritage Foundation in the mid-90s a "leftward initiative."

Clearly Friedman is very confused about the shape of the American political spectrum. He repeatedly refers to the plan put forward by Morgan Stanley director Erskine Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson to cut Social Security and Medicare for middle class retirees "cen...

Wonkblog Doesn't Like Financial Speculation Taxes

That would be the conclusion of folks who played with its interactive calculator on ways to have President Obama reach his deficit reduction target. The calculator includes several possible taxes which it identifies as "the most popular proposals for wholly new sources of revenue." A financial speculation tax is not included on the list. It does include a value-added tax (VAT), which would effectively be a national sales tax.

A bill calling for a financial speculation tax was sponsored last y...