Dean Baker

The NYT reports on OSHA’s look the other way approach to the enforcement of workplace safety. This is what newspapers are supposed to do. –Dean Baker

In its article on the run-off in the French presidential election, the Post tells readers that Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate, wants to cut taxes by $90 billion over the next ten years. That’s a really useful number. I’m sure that all of the Post’s readers know the size of the French economy and budget, […]

The Wall Street Journal told readers today that, according to the SS trustees, it would take a 16 percent increase in Social Security taxes to make the program solvent over its 75-year planning period. Most people don’t know that the current size of the SS tax is 12.4 percent (6.2 percent on both the employee […]

In its obituary for Boris Yeltsin, the NYT told readers that “Mr. Yeltsin�s actions ensured that there would be no turning back to the centralized Soviet command economy, which had strangled growth and reduced a country of talented and cultured people and rich in natural resources to a beggar among nations.” According to the Penn […]

A Post business columnist implicitly assumed that price to earnings ratios for the stock market will go far above the bubble peaks of 2000, at least if we take seriously the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates of corporate profits. The column assumed that 401(k) accounts would provide a nominal return averaging 10 percent annually over the […]

Okay, I’m writing this one in anger. The Washington Post printed a letter today from Richard Berman, the executive director of the Center for Union Facts [think business front group], that attacked a study that we did on the probability that an activist would be fired in a union organizing campaign. The letter claimed that […]

The NYT reports today that “fueled by soaring exports and huge investments in infrastructure, factories and energy supplies, China could soon overtake Germany to become the world�s third-largest economy, behind those of the United States and Japan.” It is incredible that our country’s preeminent newspaper doesn’t have any idea how large the world’s second biggest […]

Reporters generally think it’s their job to just report what the major actors in a political debate say, but do they also have a responsibility to point out when the comments are absurd? In the debate over Representative Barney Frank’s bill requiring companies to have non-binding shareholder votes on CEO compensation, some of the opposing […]

The Post reports on people selling their homes for less than the amount outstanding on their mortgages. The seller must bring money to the closing. Too bad the piece didn’t include comments from David Lererah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors and the author of the 2005 bestseller, Why the Real Estate […]

The NYT reported that China is becoming less dependent on exports to the United States, noting that the U.S accounted for 31 percent of Chinese exports in 2000, but just 22.7 percent in February. However, the article mistakenly uses an exchange rate of measure of GDP to tell readers that U.S. exports are still almost […]