Dean Baker's Blog, page 80

Mixed Up Math in NYT on Health Care

Margot Sanger-Katz had an interesting NYT Upshot piece on various proposals that are designed to have modest savings in health care that collectively could add up to large savings. The headline suggests that the target for these proposals is knocking one percent off of national health care spending.

It gives as an example using nursing facilities rather than hospitals for elderly patients in need of long-term treatments. The article cites evidence which indicates this could save the country $...

Quick Thoughts on the Collapse of Lehman

Robert Samuelson takes on the collapse of Lehman a decade ago and assesses the argument of Larry Ball that the Fed could have bailed out Lehman. He ends up siding with Bernanke–Paulson and says the Fed would have taken big losses if it bailed out Lehman. He also says we would have seen the financial crisis anyhow.

There are three points worth making here. First, the claim that the Fed lacked the legal authority to bail out Lehman is absurd on its face. The Fed was doing lots of things at that...

Federal Jobs Training Program Costing 0.04 Percent of the Budget is Alleged to Be Failing Students

The headline of an NYT article on the Trump administration's plan to overhaul the Jobs Corps program told readers that the program cost $1.7 billion. Since almost none of the NYT's readers has any idea of the size of the federal budget, this headline was really providing no information whatsoever.

In fact, since $1.7 billion is a very large amount of money to people who are not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, it likely misled many readers into believing that this program is a major expenditure for...

Contrary to What the NYT Tells You, the Next Crisis is Not Just Around the Corner

The NYT had a major editorial arguing against the rush by Republicans (and some Democrats) to selectively deregulate the financial sector. (It is important to note that the industry doesn't want to eliminate government protections that benefit it, like deposit insurance or the Fed's support in a crisis.) The gist of the piece is that we are lurching towards another 2008–09 financial crisis. (It is titled "inviting the next financial crisis.")

The highlight of this argument is the high value o...

Chicago Police and the Nike Bait Truck — Imagine Baiting Wall Street Bankers with Fraudulent Securities Scheme

This is a truly incredible story. The Chicago police cooperated with Norfolk Southern Railroad in putting a truck filled with Nike shoes in a low-income largely black neighborhood. When kids from the neighborhood saw the truck and came to take shoes they were arrested for burglary.

In a city with a sky-high murder rate, this is a great use of the police's resources. It is also a great way to establish good relations with the community.

Since baiting people is apparently in style with law enfo...

Chicago Police and the Nike Bait Truck -- Imagine Baiting Wall Street Bankers with Fraudulent Securities Scheme

This is a truly incredible story. The Chicago police cooperated with Norfolk Southern Railroad in putting a truck filled with Nike shoes in a low-income largely black neighborhood. When kids from the neighborhood saw the truck and came to take shoes they were arrested for burglary.

In a city with a sky-high murder rate, this is a great use of the police's resources. It is also a great way to establish good relations with the community.

Since baiting people is apparently in style with law enfo...

Bad News for Donald Trump, China is Already Bigger Than the United States

As we know, Donald Trump is not very good with numbers. He gave more evidence of this fact when he told a campaign rally in West Virginia:

"When I came, we were heading in a certain direction that was going to allow China to be bigger than us in a very short period of time ...That’s not going to happen anymore.”

Actually, China's economy is already considerably bigger than the US economy. Using the purchasing power parity measure, which is recommended by most economists and the CIA World Fa...

Just as the Job-Killing Robots Come Along, China May Run Out of People

That's apparently a big concern of the Chinese government, at least according to this NYT article. An inadequate supply of housing has also led to high rents, according to the article. This is yet another reason for the government to be concerned about a declining population.

Robert Samuelson Touts the Sun Coming Up and Good News About the Economy

About two decades ago, when my colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute were first beginning to make serious inroads in getting the media to accept that growing inequality was a problem, there were several studies that argued we shouldn't be concerned because we had high rates of mobility. The argument was that even if a snapshot showed there was a bigger gap between the top and everyone else, this wasn't a big deal because we saw people constantly changing places in the income hierarchy....

Washington Post Reports that Restricting Work Visas Has Raised Wages in the Maryland Crab Industry

This is one of the main items in a Washington Post article on the Maryland crab industry. While the gist of the piece is that many of the crab packagers on Maryland's eastern shore are struggling because they can't get enough workers as a result of a reduction in the number H2-B visas available, the piece says that the crabbers have increased wages in order to attract more workers.

If the point of the limiting immigration in this sector was to raise wages, then the limits seem to have been su...