Dean Baker's Blog, page 86

NPR Also Says America Has Incompetent CEOs

The top of the hour lead into Morning Edition (sorry, no link) told listeners that hiring will be down for June because employers can't find workers. Of course, employers who understand basic economics can find workers: they just raise pay to pull them away from competitors.

We aren't seeing any large-scale increases in pay despite near-record profit shares. This suggests that either employers really are not short of workers or that they are too incompetent to understand the basics of the mar...

Businesses Can't Find Qualified CEOs, Don't Know How to Raise Wages

That's the implication of this CNBC piece that claims that hiring is down because businesses can't find qualified workers. If this is really the problem, then the solution, as everyone learns in intro economics, is to raise wages. For some reason, CEOs apparently can't seem to figure this one out, since wage growth remains very modest in spite of this alleged shortage of qualified workers.

Businesses should be well-positioned to absorb higher wages since their profits have soared over the las...

Jeff Bezos' Washington Post Is Upset About People Getting Disability Insurance

The paper owned by the man who got incredibly rich by avoiding state and local sales taxes is upset because workers are getting Social Security disability payments that average less than $1,300 a month. Since the U.S. has one of the least generous disability programs of any wealthy country, this might seem like a strange concern. Here's the picture from the OECD.

 

 

Source: OECD.

Of course the Post is also a paper that gets hysterical over the prospect that truck drivers will get...

NYT Gets Hysterical About Non-Existent Debt Crisis

It is common practice for people who completely missed the housing bubble to warn about another impending debt crisis which will sink the economy when it bursts. In this vein, we have a New York Times editorial telling us about the dangerous increase in credit card debt.

The piece tells readers:

"And now rates are now rising at time when household debt reached a record $13.21 trillion in the first quarter. Household debt service payments as a percentage of disposable income hit 5.9 percent in...

Bloomberg Is Also Worried About Truckers Getting Higher Pay

Bloomberg doesn't seem quite as scared as the Washington Post, which worries that if truckers earn $60,000 a year it would sink the economy, but it also seems really disturbed that employers can't get more drivers without paying them more. This one is in some ways even more over the top than the Post piece. It wants to blame the government.

The story here is that there are restrictions on hours, which used to be tracked using paper records, but now are verified electronically. This makes chea...

Educating David Frum and the Atlantic About the Trade Deficit

You can make a very good living coming up with stories about how the U.S. trade deficit is a good thing. After all, the jobs that are lost are overwhelming the jobs of less educated workers. In addition, the fact that trade takes away the jobs of millions of less-educated workers puts downward pressure on the pay of people without college degrees more generally.

That means that the folks with college and advanced degrees, who are largely protected from international competition by protectioni...

The Washington Post Really Really Hates Markets When It Means Higher Pay for Ordinary Workers

The Washington Post had yet another hysterical piece about how "America's Severe Trucker Shortage" could undermine the economy. While the piece features the usual complaints from employers about how they can't get anyone to work for them no matter how much they pay, the data indicate they aren't trying very hard. Here's the inflation adjusted average hourly pay for production and non-supervisory workers in the trucking industry since 1990.

Real Hourly Wage: Truck Transportation, Production an...

Isn't It Time for Another Washington Post Article Touting the Growth of Mexico's Middle Class Under NAFTA?

Mexico seems all but certain to elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a left-wing candidate, as president this weekend. One of the main factors is the contempt with which the Mexican public regards a political and economic elite that have run the country in a way that has produced few benefits for the bulk of the population. It is striking that this uprising is taking place almost a quarter century into the NAFTA era.

We were told endlessly by our elites that NAFTA was doing great things for Mex...

Trump Tax Cut Leads to Investment Boom (Just Kidding)

For folks who can remember all the way back to last fall, the promise was that a huge boom in investment would lead to more rapid productivity growth. Higher productivity would mean pay would be close to 10 percent higher than in the baseline scenario after a decade.

Well, the data disagree. We got new data on capital goods orders yesterday. Here's the picture.

If you see a boom here since the tax cut, you may want to get the prescription on your glasses checked. It's not a terrible story, b...

News for Dana Milbank: Bankers Don't Give Campaign Contributions to People Who Try to Take Their Money and Put Them in Jail

No one expects great insights from people who write columns for the Washington Post but Dana Milbank hit a serious low today when he referred to the fact that Representative Joseph Crowley took large amounts of money from the financial industry and other special interests as "largely non-ideological." Those of us who don't write columns for the Washington Post realize that campaign contributors are not in the charity business. They expect and generally get something in exchange for their mone...