Dean Baker's Blog, page 511

Robert Samuelson Again Forgets What He Said About the Budget Deficit

Less than a month ago Robert Samuelson told readers that it was unreasonable to expect the Super Committee to solve the country's deficit problem since the real issue is health care. He said that the Super Committee was not going to come up with a politically acceptable way to fix health care in three months so it was unrealistic to imagine that it would produce a solution to the long-run deficit problem.

His comments in today's column suggest that he is unfamiliar with the piece he wrote...

Jonathan Alter and Nonsense on the Second Great Depression

For family reasons I had occasion to see some of the Sunday morning talk shows. (These are best avoided for those with an attachment to reality.)

I got to see Jonathan Alter explain how President Obama and the Fed prevented a second Great Depression. The story went that the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month when President Obama took office in January. If this had continued until the end of the year then we would have had a second Great Depression. Therefore the steps taken by President ...

NYT Gives Case Study in Bad Reporting on Detroit

As a general rule budget reporting in this country is atrocious. It is standard practice to report numbers for the aggregate budget or specific programs without providing any context that would make these numbers meaningful. Often articles do not even make clear the number of years over which spending or revenue will be spread, as though it makes no difference whether we are talking about spending $200 billion over one year or ten. The NYT carried this a step further in a news article on...

NYT GIves Case Study in Bad Reporting on Detroit

As a general rule budget reporting in this country is atrocious. It is standard practice to report numbers for the aggregate budget or specific programs without providing any context that would make these numbers meaningful. Often articles do not even make clear the number of years over which spending or revenue will be spread, as though it makes no difference whether we are talking about spending $200 billion over one year or ten. The NYT carried this a step further in a news article on...

Downward Revisions at the National Association of Realtors

Several people have asked me about the news that the National Association of Realtors (NAR) are revising down their estimates of existing home sales over the last 4 years by an average of 14 percent. I have not looked at this issue in great detail, but the NAR explanation does seem plausible on its face.

Their story is that they rely on data from realtor sales for most of their estimate and then impute a fixed percentage for owner sold properties. In principle, they should also remove new...

The Protectionist Washington Post Won't Even Discuss Trade in Health Care

The United States pays more than twice as much per person for its health care as the average for other wealthy countries. It has little to show for this in the way of outcomes as it ranks near the bottom in terms of life expectancy. If we paid the same amount per person as people in other wealthy countries then we would face no long-term deficit problem, as the long-term projections would show budget surpluses rather than deficits.

This is why it is striking that a lengthy Washington Post...

The Post Disagrees With Financial Markets

In an article discussing House Speaker John Boehner's performance in his job, the Post referred to his negotiations last summer with President Obama over, "the federal government's swelling debt problem." Newspapers interested in maintaining the separation between the news and opinion pages would have simple referred to the debate over raising the debt ceiling, which is what was at issue.

The debt has risen rapidly because of the recession that followed in the wake of the collapse of the...

Tell Andrew Gelman: Reducing Inequality Doesn't Have to Mean Raising Taxes

It is more than a little bizarre to read a column on public attitudes to inequality in the NYT which completely equates reducing inequality with raising taxes. In fact, the main reason that inequality has risen so much over the last three decades has been the increase in the inequality of before-tax income.

This increase is attributable to policies like a trade policy that subjects manufacturing workers to competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while largely protecting...

Politifact and the Echo Chamber Nation

Politifact told its readers about the "Echo Chamber Nation" in its follow up to it "Lie of the Year" story, but not quite in the way they intended. To remind readers, the Politifact Lie of the Year was the Democrats' claim that the Ryan plan approved by the Republican House would end Medicare. The Ryan plan would in fact replace the fee for service Medicare that has been in place since the program was created in 1966 with a system of "premium supports," which most people would call a...

And You Thought You Were the Only One Who Read BTP

We made John Nichols Honor Roll for Most Valuable Economic News Source over at the Nation. I'd like to get a mention for most accurate, but no one gives awards for that.