Dean Baker's Blog, page 67

Mayor de Blasio Wants to Give New York’s Workers a Break

Mayor de Blasio has proposed an ordinance that would guarantee workers in the city at least two weeks a year of paid vacation. In taking this step, de Blasio is bringing the city in line with every other wealthy country in the world, which have long had paid vacation as a basic right of employment.

It is striking how out of line the United States is with the rest of the world in not providing paid vacation. When I first met my wife, who is from Denmark, she told me about how the unions in the...

The US Is Not That Important to China

It is common to see stories that have China's economy reeling as a result of the Trump tariffs. While it does seem that China's economy is experiencing difficulties, it is hard to tell a story where Trump's tariffs are a major factor.

First, as I pointed out in the past, China's trade surplus has actually risen in 2018 compared to 2017. In the first 10 months of 2018, (Census is not releasing new data because of the shutdown), China's surplus on goods trade was up 11.5 percent from 2017. Perh...

If China Is Suffering So Much Because of Trump's Trade War, Why Is Its Surplus Up So Much?

Donald Trump has made his tariffs against China and other countries a big part of his agenda as president. He even went so far as to dub himself "Tariff Man" on Twitter.

The media have been quick to assume that Tariff Man is accomplishing his goals, especially with regard to China. It is standard for news articles, like this one, to assert that China's economy is suffering in large part because of Trump's tariffs.

In fact, through the first ten months of 2018 China's trade surplus with the Un...

Protectionist Measure to Help US Corporations at the Expense of US Workers Tops Trump China Trade Agenda

Readers of this NYT piece on Robert Lighthizer, United States trade representative, and his negotiations with China may have missed this point. The piece said that one of Lighthizer’s main goals was to stop China’s practice of requiring that companies like Boeing and GE, who set up operations in China, take Chinese companies as business partners.

This is an effective way of requiring technology transfers since the partners will become familiar with the production techniques of the US companie...

Protectionist Measure to Help U.S. Corporations at the Expense of U.S. Workers Tops Trump China Trade Agenda

Readers of this NYT piece on Robert Lighthizer, United States trade representative, and his negotiations with China may have missed this point. The piece said that one of Lighthizer’s main goals was to stop China’s practice of requiring that companies like Boeing and GE, who set up operations in China, take Chinese companies as business partners.

This is an effective way of requiring technology transfers, since the partners will become familiar with the production techniques of the U.S. compa...

Things that Could Trouble Investors in 2019

The NYT ran a piece that mentions four factors that could be bad news for investors in 2019. While returns to investors are not my major economic concern, the piece left out what I would consider to be the biggest risk: a profit squeeze.

The low unemployment rate is finally leading to some acceleration in wage growth. The annual rate of hourly wage growth over the last year has been 3.2 percent. Taking the average of the last three months (September, October, and November) compared with the p...

Resolutions to Improve Debates on Economic Policy in 2019

(This post originally appeared on my Patreon page.)

Okay, it’s that time of year when we are all supposed to commit ourselves to performing nearly impossible tasks over the next twelve months. I will play the game. Here is the list of areas where I will try to bring economics into economic policy debates in 2019.

1) Patent and copyright monopolies are government policies:

This one is pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. It should be pretty obvious that these and other forms of int...

E.J. Dionne Provides Classic Example of Liberals Missing the Boat

I often rail against liberals who wring their hands over the unfortunate folks who have been left behind by globalization and technology. E.J. Dionne gave us a classic example of such hand-wringing in his piece today on the need to help the left behinds to keep them from flaming reactionaries.

For some reason, it is difficult for many liberals to grasp the idea that the bad plight of tens of millions of middle class workers did not just happen, but rather was deliberately engineered. Longer a...

Steven Rattner's Charts in the NYT Don't Show What He Says They Show

Steven Rattner used his NYT column to present a number of charts to show Donald Trump's failures as president. While some, like the drop in enrollments in the health care exchanges, do in fact show failure, others do not really make his case. 

For example, he has a chart with a headline "paltry raise for the middle class." What his chart actually shows is that middle class wages, adjusted for inflation, fell sharply in the recession, but have been rising roughly 1.0 percent a year since...

Good News on Copyright

NYT has an interesting piece on the flood of books that are about to come into the public domain now that the term for the last extention of copyright (from 75 to 95 years) is about to be reached. This extension was applied retroactvely, so it meant that virtually no copyrighted works came into the public domain for 20 years.

As policy, making a copyright extension is rather bizarre, since it is impossible to provide incentives for things that happened in the past. As the piece notes, one of...