Dean Baker

Diane Rehm often has very good shows with guests who present clearly distinct political perspectives. However, when it comes to talking about the problem posed by the budget deficit, balance is thrown out the window. Yesterday, she had investment banker Robert Hormat present a diatribe about the need to eliminate the budget deficit. There were […]

Yeah, that would not be news to any economist, but why is the negative impact of military spending on the economy never raised in political debates? President Bush has said that he won’t do anything serious to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because it would hurt economic growth, and that was the end of his discussion. […]

I always ask for the impossible. Anne Applebaum had a column in the Washington Post celebrating the fact that Europeans are now freely moving across national borders. She sees this free movement of people as victory over French unions and Polish bureaucrats. The Europeans can decide for themselves how much freedom of movement across borders […]

The Friday Post had an article offering the discouraging news from a study from the Centers for Disease Control that baby boomers are suffering from arthritis at a much higher rate than their parents. If this trend continues, it certainly augers poorly for the health of the baby boomers, as well as the cost of […]

That’s what the Wall Street Journal told its readers today. That’s pretty good reporting if the the WSJ reporters can tell us what insurers really think. Most of us just have to rely on what they say. Of course, it is not surprising that insurers say that paying billions of extra dollars each year to […]

Paul Krugman notes (following Floyd Norris) that in spite of soaring profits, the investment share of GDP is falling. This is very bad news for the economy, although it is not the first time it has happened. Net investment as a share of output actually peaked in the 70s, when the profit share was at […]

Austin Goolsbee tells us in his NYT column that the proliferation of reality TV shows is the price that we pay for the greater diversity of television offerings. The argument is that it is expensive to develop a scripted show, and with the audience now splintered among hundreds of cable and satellite channels, it is […]

The media report that the stock market rallied yesterday in response to the good economic news released that day. It cited the release of new data on durable goods orders and new house sales. I wonder if I was looking at the same reports. The Commerce Department’s data did show better than expected durable good […]

Some folks may have caught the NYT headline on an article reporting on March existing home sales, “Sales of Previously Owned Homes Plunge to 1989 Level.” This is a case of headline writers gone wild. The point that he/she was trying to make is that this was the sharpest one month drop in home sales […]

The NYT has an article about recent changes in Turkey’s society and economy in which it asserts that “the economy has nearly doubled in the four years that the AK [the ruling Islamic party] has been in power, largely because it has stuck to an economic program prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.” According to […]