Dean Baker

David Leonhardt uses his column to point out that house prices are declining far more than the standard indices show. He misses my two favorite reasons. First, sellers often throw in many extras to make a sale now (e.g. help on closing costs, paying for repairs, paying condo fees for a year etc.). Sellers had […]

The NYT has an article reporting on how hundreds of thousands of low-income Medicare beneficiaries may find themselves suddenly paying much more for their prescriptions on January 1, if they don’t take the right steps to ensure that they are properly registered to receive means-tested benefits, or that they are enrolled in a plan that […]

The NYT has a piece examining efforts to require that employers provide workers with at least 7 days a year of paid sick leave. The article has a good discussion of why workers might need paid time off. It then includes the obligatory comments from small business owners who complain that this requirement will raise […]

Had this website been working, I would have been saying a lot about the economic news on Friday. The Commerce Department reported that non-residential construction fell by 0.7 percent in October following a downwardly revised fall of 0.6 percent in September. This should put to an end silly claims that growth in the non-residential sector […]

Would the Chinese central bank be concerned about the fall in the dollar against the euro and other free floating currencies? Absolutely, the bank is targetting the price of its currency in order to sustain demand Chinese exports. If the dollar falls against other currencies, this means that the yuan is falling against other currencies. […]

BTP is back after being silenced by evil doers inside the Internet. The involuntary break gave me the opportunity to calm down after seeing an NYT personal finance column that told people to assume that they will collect little or none of their Social Security benefits (“Plan to Retire But Leave Social Security Out of […]

The NYT had a very interesting piece about a new laptop computer, designed for the developing world, which is supposed to sell for $150 a piece, with the price projected to drop to $100 in a couple of years. (The computer uses a Linux operating system.) While this sounds like it could potentially be a […]

Chris Farrell demonstrated the incredible contempt with which the elites view the American public in his comments on MarketPlace this morning. He assured us that “everyone” agrees on what a solution to the Social Security solvency problem looks like. At the top of his list was raising the retirement age. All the polls that I […]

We keep hearing about the failings of the U.S. education system. Economic columnists give us endless examples of such failings. Alan Sloan, a columnist for Newsweek, the Washington Post and MarketPlace radio gives us a beauty in a column that appeared in some form in all three venues (here’s the Newsweek version.) Sloan notes that […]

Okay, you all knew that one wasn’t true. Any reporter at a major newspaper who wrote an article on the prospects for the auto industry and only talked to representatives of the UAW would quickly be out of a job. The question then is why is it okay for reporters to write a story on […]