Dean Baker

http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Globe_Graphic/2007/04/17/1176856742_6303.gif –Dean Baker

David Leonhardt has an interesting column that talks about the top economic advisors to the leading presidential candidates. He concludes by listing the things that he thinks that they could all agree on. One of the items on this list is that Social Security benefits would be reduced for high earners “to shore up the […]

I was somewhat surprised by the reporting on the 0.6 percent rise in the March CPI. Most of it ignored the sharp rise in the overall index (which followed a jump of 0.4 percent in February) and focused on the small 0.1 percent rise in the core. They viewed this as evidence that inflation is […]

The NYT has a good article this morning about undocumented workers losing jobs in the construction industry. It points out that many of these jobs probably never appeared in the government’s data, so the loss of the jobs is not showing up now. Of course, readers of CEPR’s data bytes would have known this two […]

At tax time, both the Post and the NYT looks at efforts to crack down on tax cheating. The Post tells us that “Unpaid Taxes Tough to Recover.” The NYT tells us that increases in IRS auditing efforts have been focused on middle class taxpayers. It also reminds us that the IRS does nearly 600,000 […]

The NYT has a column today laboring over the meaning of the H1-B visa program. It asks whether employers are treating U.S. workers fairly or whether the visa program is simply a way to get cheaper labor. Okay, this is really dumb. Of course the visa program is a way to get cheaper labor. Suppose […]

The NYT has an interesting article that gives some background to payoffs by private lenders to get universities to opt out of participating in the government’s direct student loan program. This would remove the government as a competitor in the student loan market. At one point the article asserts that in the area of student […]

It was widely reported that the trade deficit shrank in February. This is true when the deficit is measured in nominal dollars. It declined by $0.5 billion from $58.9 billion in January to $58.4 billion in February. The nominal measure is the key number in assessing how much the country is currently borrowing from abroad. […]

Just nine months behind BTP, the Economist has discovered the productivity slowdown, dating the middle of 2004 as a turning point. While most of the story seems right, I will correct their claims about employment in residential housing construction. This is a sector that relies heavily on undocumented workers. The article suggests that firms are […]

The media largely ignored the Labor Department’s reporting of March data on import and export prices. Both showed substantial increases in March, as non-oil import prices rose 0.3 percent and non-agricultural exports prices rose 0.6 percent. These monthly data are highly erratic, but the year over year increase in non-oil import prices is 2.9 percent […]