Dean Baker

The NYT editorial board continued its dogmatic pursuit of selective free trade in its lead editorial this morning. The piece includes typical spin tactics, using arguments or claims that they presumably know are misleading. Here are my three favorites: 1) The U.S. is the world leading exporter, therefore we gain from trade — Put this […]

It is well-known that political figures often use inaccurate terms to describe their views and their policies. For example, the Soviet bloc countries usually referred to themselves as �peoples� democracies.� This did not mean that the Soviet bloc governments represented the people, or that their leaders were committed to democracy, and reporters recognized this fact. […]

Rex Nutting shows that there is at least one reporter that pays attention to this important data series on the state of the country’s housing market. –Dean Baker

The NYT reports that the Republicans in the Senate are insisting on $8.3 billion in tax cuts as their price for allowing an increase in the minimum wage. The article commits the common sin of not telling readers the time period over which these cuts will take place or providing any context that would allow […]

As I feared, the media seem to have completely missed the record vacancy rate on ownership units reported by the Census Bureau yesterday. The 4th quarter data showed the vacancy rate at 2.7 percent, 50 percent higher than its level of two years ago. It had never crossed 2.0 percent before 2005. The decision to […]

Washington Post columnist Allan Sloan gets the BTP prize for being the first reporter/columnist to discover the effect that President Bush’s health care proposal would have on Social Security. The basic story, as I explained last week, is that workers would have much of their income exempted from Social Security taxes if they bought a […]

It is positively bizarre how discussions of trade liberalization always ignore the possibility of liberalizing trade in highly paid professional services. There really are no great mysteries in the recent pattern of trade or its consequences. The trade policies of administrations of both political parties have been designed to put less educated workers (primarily manufacturing […]

This is another one of my preemptive strikes. Perhaps the most under-reported release of economic data is the quarterly data on housing vacancy rates from the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau just released the data for fourth quarter of 2006. This showed the vacancy rate for owner occupied housing hitting 2.7 percent. This is up […]

It is silly to make long-term comparsions of oil prices without adjusting for the inflation in the intervening years. When a NYT article tells us that oil prices in the 80s had settled at around $18 a barrel in the mid-eighties, it would be worth telling readers that this translates into about $32 a barrel […]

In a front page article on President Bush’s changing statements on climate change, the Post tells readers that he will spend $29 billion on “climate science, aid, and incentives.” Is there even a single reader of this sentence, apart from those actually working on climate policy, who has any idea what this commitment means? For […]