Dean Baker

Economists like to make very simple propositions seem very complex. (How else could they command large salaries?) Trade is one such case. Since there seems to be so much confusion, let me lay out the basic story here. The gains from trade stem from the possibility of getting goods or services cheaper from abroad than […]

By my count, Thomas Edsall found the need to use the word “protectionist” 5 times in his attack (TImes Select) on the populist appeal of many of the Democrats who won seats in Congress this month. It’s too bad that he couldn’t refrain from name-calling long enough to think about the underlying issues. The basic […]

The Washington Post just won’t give it a rest. Just after a new Congress was elected, in part in response to President Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security, the Post editorializes that it is now a great time to “reform” Social Security. Columnist Sebastian Mallaby also threw in another diatribe for good measure. The Post […]

It is unfortunate that a debate over the economic agenda of the Democratic party seems to be starting from the Clintonites’ framework. There are many important issues about economic policy at stake, but the question of a free market and free trade verse government intervention is not one of them. Trade has played an important […]

The NYT business section had a column today urging cautious optimism about the economy’s future. While the case for pessimism is clear enough (crashing housing market leads to continued declines in housing related sectors, which are soon amplifed by falling consumption, as consumers lose the ability to borrow against homes that have lost value) the […]

Lobbyists and politicians often try to obscure issues when they advocate positions favored only by relatively small special interest groups. They did their job well in helping to frame a Washington Post piece on the Medicare drug benefit. The article discusses the possibility of having Medicare negotiate drug prices directly with the industry, a position […]

Serious newspapers try to separate their editorial pages and their news reporting, but not the Washington Post. As regular Post readers know, the editors desperately want to cut and/or privatize Social Security. The program’s overwhleming popularity, coupled with the fact that the Congresssional Budget Office’s projections show Social Security to be fully solvent for the […]

I know that I shouldn’t waste time beating up on Thomas Friedman, but hey, it’s fun. Today he is back in classic Thomas Friedman form, drafting the memo (Times select) that Nancy Pelosi should send to China’s President Hu Jintao. Speaker Pelosi’s memo begins with some incoherent commitments on energy efficiency: “First, China has committed […]

The Wall Street Journal features a long piece today noting the growth in inequality and what the Democrats might do about it. Remarkably, the article never once examines how the government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has structured the market in ways that shift income upward. Can a Wall Street Journal reporter really not […]

Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby rivals Thomas Friedman as a cheerleader for the U.S. trade agenda. He made yet another appeal on Monday, using arguments that he shoud know are fallacious. One of these ranks high on my list of all-time favorites for fallacious arguments. He makes the case that growth is the key for […]