Dean Baker

In the wake of some of the comments from my last post, I thought I should make a few points on inequality and trade. 1) High-end professionals like doctors and lawyers have been winners in the economy of the last quarter century. It is not true that only the very wealthy have benefited. (If only […]

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers got fired from his last job as president of Harvard. He doesn’t seem to be doing much better at his current job, working as a columnist at the Financial Times. Today’s column rightly notes the anger produced by growing inequality in the United States, but he misses both the dimensions […]

Both the NYT and Post came through with some genuinely awful budget pieces today. The articles committed not only the common sin of printing large budget numbers without placing them in any context, they also failed to give readers any sense of the time periods involved. For example, the NYT article refers to a provision […]

Ed Andrews at the NYT did some great investigative pieces a few months back that are likely to bear fruit in the new Congress. He exposed the fact that the government (under Clinton) had given leases to drill on public land, without any royalty provisions. Previous leases had suspended royalty payments if the price of […]

I was asleep at the wheel earlier in the week when I let news reports about the downward revisions to unit labor costs pass without comment. According to several articles (see the NYT, for example) downward revisions to unit labor costs in 2nd and 3rd quarter in the release of the preliminary productivity data for […]

The NYT had a front page article noting that real wages for most workers have begun rising in the last few months. This is of course good news — the vast majority of people get the vast majority of their income from working — if wages don�t rise, most people are not benefiting from economic […]

The Wall Street Journal joined the crowd pronouncing the Medicare drug plan a great success, going so far as to tell readers that the Democrats may not be able to bring down the cost of the plan, even if Congress allowed Medicare to negotiate prices. In fairness, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also says that […]

Austan Goolsbee used his monthly column to report the findings of a study that sought to examine bias in the media by seeing whether they use Republican or Democratic phrases. For example, in the case of President Bush’s plans for Social Security, the Republican phrase would be “personal accounts,” while the Democratic phrase would be […]

The WSJ has an article today reporting on how Europe appears to be outpacing the U.S. in economic growth at present. Most of the article is devoted to the positive aspects of the European economy, but at the very end the article reports the standard line about the need for deregulating the European economy. It […]

The Jihad continues just blocks from the White House. The Washington Post has yet another column calling for fixing the incredibly solvent (by U.S. standards) Social Security system. There will be a day where real numbers, actual projections from the Congressional Budget Office in some real world context, will appear in the Washington Post. And […]