Dean Baker

NPR did a propaganda piece on small businesses on Morning Edition today, featuring an uncritical interview with the Karen Mills, the head of the Small Business Administration (SBA). There are many good things that one can say about small businesses. They are responsible for the overwhelming number of new jobs in the economy, they are […]

It’s often said that everyone in Washington is so smart that they skipped directly from 2nd grade to 4th grade. This explains why so many people in top positions don’t know third grade arithmetic. The WSJ gave us another example of this lack of knowledge when it listed Medicare and Social Security as “the U.S.’s […]

Japan is one of the most crowded countries in the world. It hires people to push commuters into over-packed Tokyo subway cars during rush hours. Given its overcrowding, it is difficult to see why the Japanese people should view the prospect of the declining population as a crisis, as the Washington Post argues in a […]

The NYT discussed the prospects for the 2009 bonus for Goldman Sachs CEO Loyd Blankfein, which it reports could be as high as $100 million. The article notes anger over the huge bonuses at bailed out institutions, but then tells readers that Goldman paid back the money “with interest.” It would have also been worth […]

The NYT tells readers that: “China’s leaders have grown impatient with lectures on economic policy from their chief debtor, the United States.” The reason that the United States is China largest debtor is that China is buying up massive amounts of U.S. government debt and other dollar denominated assets to maintain the high value of […]

According to the NYT, when the Senate Banking Committee heard testimony by Paul Volcker on his proposal to restrict proprietary trading by commercial banks, Senator Bob Corker expressed concern that the restrictions would cause banks to move overseas. It appears as though Mr. Corker implied that this would be a bad thing. In fact, if […]

In the middle of an article discussing the likelihood that homeowners who are underwater in their mortgages would just walk away and turn over the house to bank, the NYT tells readers that: “doing nothing about underwater mortgages could encourage more walk-aways, dealing another blow to a fragile economy.” It is not clear on what […]

There is a new favorite in the “stupid things that intellectuals say” category. As David Brooks tells readers in the NYT this morning: “the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children.” Of course this is true. That is because we run a retirement program through the federal […]

Okay, I don’t know if the Post really has a record, but they do continue to misinform readers by referring to this year’s budget deficit as a “record.” Of course measured relative to the size of the economy, at 11 percent of GDP, the current deficit is well short of the record deficits during World […]

The Obama administration deserves credit in trying to make the spending from the stimulus package and its impact on employment as transparent as possible. They asked the beneficiaries of this money at the state and local level (both Democrats and Republicans) to list the jobs funded with it. This is a great step forward in […]