Dean Baker's Blog, page 461

NYT Tells Us Everyone Agrees About the Deficit Problem, Just Like Everyone Agreed There Was No Housing Bubble

It's so nice not to exist. After all, the NYT told readers today:

"By all accounts, the next few years of declining deficits will be followed by years in which deficits will send the overall debt to unsustainable heights as the large baby boom generation ages, qualifying for ever-costlier medical benefits."

Of course that isn't my account. My account points out that the story of deficits that will "send the overall debt to unsustainable heights" is the story of a badly broken health care syst...

Commerce Department Issues Secret Report Showing Plunge in Housing Vacancy Rates

Okay, it's not really secret. You can find it here, but the almost complete absence of media coverage might have led people to believe that the report was secret.

Anyhow, the numbers are striking. The report showed a decline in the rental vacancy rate from 8.8 percent to 8.6 percent. The vacancy rate for ownership units fell from 2.2 percent to 2.1 percent. While the quarterly drop by itself is not that impressive, it follows a sharp drop reported for the prior quarter. This suggests that the...

Good News on Weekly Unemployment Claims and No One Notices

I have often used to space to harangue news outlets for making too much of relatively small changes in weekly unemployment insurance (UI) claims. After all, it is just one week's worth of data. The numbers are erratic and subject to substantial revision.

Still, I would have thought the decline in claims reported yesterday would have gotten some more attention. It wasn't so much the single week decline that was newsworthy as the fact that the 4-week moving average, 367,250 was very close to th...

Brooks Complains About the Monomaniacs Who Insist Earth Is Round

David Brooks concludes a bizarre column explaining our love for the Olympics with the ability to keep contradictory ideas simultaneously in our mind. We admire both glory of the winner and also the nobility of the good loser.

He uses this observation to then criticize "monomaniacs."

"The world, unfortunately, has too many monomaniacs — people who pick one side of any creative tension and wish the other would just go away. Some parents and teachers like the cooperative virtues and distrust the...

Horrors! Unpublished Study Used to Raise Health Questions About Fracking

Elaine K. Hill, a doctoral candidate in Cornell University’s department of applied economics and management, found evidence that fracking is associated with the frequency of low birth weight babies. The findings of her study implied that for mothers living close to a fracking site, the probability of a low birth weight baby increased by 25 percent.

While this might be important information for government officials and the general public to have when considering restrictions on fracking, New Y...

More TARP Bashing

There is an interesting column by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers circulating on the web that could pass under the title "all economists agree." While I would add my name to most of the propositions on the list, at the risk of losing my economist license, I have to disagree with their comments on the TARP.

Stevenson and Wolfers ask us to:

"consider the widely despised bank bailouts. Populist politicians on both sides have taken to pounding the table against them (in many cases, only after...

Reuters Entry in Worst Reporting of the Year Contest: Tells Readers "June New Home Sales Post Biggest Drop in Over One Year"

Reuters must be trying to win a Pulitzer in the bad business reporting category (sorry folks, you've got some stiff competition). The headline of a piece on the Commerce Department's report on new home sales for June warned of the largest drop in sales more than a year. Are you scared?

If you look at the data, you would notice that May had one of the biggest jumps in sales in the last year, raising the rate to the highest level since the fall of 2008. Furthermore, three quarters of the drop w...

Washington Pundits Are So Cute When They Try To Figure Out the Obvious

Robert Samuelson's column lays out the factors that caused the huge surplus predicted for the last decade by the Congressional Budget Office to turn into a huge deficit. Samuelson cites analysis of the $12 trillion shift from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and two "non-partisan" groups, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the Pew Fiscal Initiative.

Samuelson and these groups are careful to say that blame for this shift is widely shared, but that the largest chunk stems f...

NYT: He Said We Could Afford Obamacare/ She Said We Couldn't

The NYT ran a piece on the new Congressional Budget Office estimates of the cost and coverage rates for the Affordable Care Act following the changes required by the Supreme Court ruling. It concluded the piece with a classic he said/she said:

"Representative Tom Price of Georgia, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, said the law was unaffordable, and he pointed to the $1.7 trillion price tag mentioned by the budget office.

But Representative Allyson Y. Schwartz, Democrat of Pen...

Fun With Andrew Biggs and the American Enterprise Institute

Andrew Biggs, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, is one of the more serious and careful people arguing conservative positions on policy issues. Nonetheless, he strikes out badly in trying to catch me in a contradiction. (Excuse the self-indulgence, consider this a carryover from my birthday boasts.)

Andrew has a blogpost where he apparently believes that he has really got me [thanks gov wonk]. I have authored or co-authored several items recently on public pensions in which I...