Dean Baker's Blog, page 90

Killing the Myth of the Gig Economy

Many pundit types were thrown for a loop by the Labor Department's release of its Contingent Worker Survey yesterday. The survey, the first one since 2005, showed no increase in the percentage of workers employed as independent contractors, such as those who work for Uber and Lyft.

While that didn't surprise those of us who follow the data closely, the release did seem to catch some of the proselytizers of the gig economy by surprise. It turns out that replacing taxi drivers (many of whom are...

Trump Threatens to Raise Taxes if G-7 Partners Don't Yield to His Demands

The Washington Post may have wanted to make this point more clearly in reporting on Donald Trump's statements as he headed off to the G–7 meeting in Canada. The piece noted Trump's Twitter comment:

"'Take down your tariffs & barriers or we will more than match you!' he wrote on Twitter. He did not specify what products he could seek to target."

Tariffs are of course excise taxes. The government imposes taxes on a specific product. In the 19th century, these taxes were the major source o...

Shortage of Dentists: Washington Post Can't Even Imagine Immigrants

Dentists in the United States earn on average a bit more than $200,000 a year. This is roughly twice the average in other wealthy countries like Canada and Germany, although still less than the $250,000 average for doctors. Their pay is more than 13 times what a minimum wage worker would take home in a year.

The conventional story for this sort of inequality is that dentists have highly valued skills in today's economy, whereas most minimum wage workers don't. As an alternative, let me sugges...

Republican Congressman Caught with Sex Worker Expresses His Commitment to Family Values: Reporting on Retirement Policy

It is a standard and really awful journalistic practice to make assertions about what politicians really believe or what is important to them. Reporters do not know what are in the heads of politicians. This is why they should just stick to reporting what they say and what they do.

Going in the opposite direction, they often neglect to report very relevant things that they say and do. Coverage of the Republicans' policies on retirement income very much falls in this category. Politico has a p...

Alex Azar: Head of HHS Claims He Doesn't Know How Insurance Markets Work

That would have been an appropriate headline for an NYT article in which Alex Azar, the head of the Department of Health and Human Sevices, claimed that the Trump Administration's policies are not responsible for double-digit price increases for insurance policies in the exchange. If Azar really believes what he claims, he doesn't understand the basics of insurance.

The Trump Administration has adopted policies that allow more healthy people to opt out of the exchanges' insurance pool. It cre...

Washington Post Does More Mind Reading on President Trump

It's great that the Washington Post has so many reporters with mind-reading abilities. As a result, we know that Trump is "convinced that his attendance at the G–7 summit is essential."

Good to know that Trump is convinced of this fact. Otherwise, we might just think it would be too politically embarrassing for him not to show up just after a statement from G–7 (minus the US) finance ministers condemned his trade policy.

If news outlets like the Post didn't have reporters with mind-reading ab...

Paying for Cancer Cures: Why Should It Be the Victims?

In her Washington Post column Megan McArdle tells readers that we are making great progress in developing cures for cancer, but then she warns these cures can be very expensive:

"But immune-based therapies are unlikely to ever be available for a few cents a dose, especially not the personalized ones. Of the immunotherapies we already have, Opdivo and Yervoy combination drug therapy can cost a quarter of a million dollars; CAR T-cell almost double that."

The part missing from this story is t...

Social Security Insolvency: AP Meant to Say "Shortfall"

With the release of the Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report AP tweeted out:

"BREAKING: Government: Medicare will become insolvent in 2026, three years earlier than expected, Social Security to follow in 2034."

What AP meant to say was that the programs would first face a shortfall. The programs would still be able to afford the vast majority of scheduled benefits. In the case of Medicare, the projections show that if nothing were done the program, it would be paying out more t...

Baseline in Education Spending Should Have Per Student Spending Rising With Per Capita GDP

The NYT had a piece documenting the drop in inflation-adjusted spending per student nationally and in many of the states that have been seeing strikes and protests by teachers. The analysis is very useful, but a figure at the top of the piece may have given readers a misleading impression.

The figure shows nationwide inflation-adjusted spending per pupil since 1970. It shows a steady rise until the Great Recession, then a fall with the downturn and a partial recovery in the last few years. It...

No You Assholes, Obama Did Not Do It Too

Let's get this straight, Donald Trump did something unbelievably stupid when he tweeted about the jobs report last Friday morning, 69 minutes before it was public. The president gets an advance copy of the report the night before, so he and his staff know what the country will be looking at the next day. They are supposed to keep it strictly secret until after its public release. In fact, the standard practice is that they don't comment on the report until at least an hour after the release.

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