Dean Baker

The NYT had a piece on Adair Turner, the head of the UK’s Financial Service Commission, and his advocacy of a tax on currency trades. Near the end, the article quotes an assertion from Richard Portes, a professor of economics at the London Business School: “It wouldn’t curb speculation, and it would have no effect […]

The NYT reported on efforts to reform the international financial system. It noted the need to correct major global imbalances. In this context, it told readers: “For the United States, that would mean increasing investment and savings while slowing the growth of consumption.” Actually, the most important change for the United States would be a […]

Both the NYT and NPR forget to mention this fact in their discussion of efforts to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. This is important because NPR told listeners that China did not have to agree to just limit emissions, but to actually reduce them. This implies that the Chinese must be forever bound to emitting less […]

The NYT decided that people who support all sorts of protection for highly educated professionals, as well as patent and copyright protections, are “free traders” just because they oppose tariff on Chinese tires. The decision to oppose tariffs that could have the benefit of benefiting workers without college makes these people selective protectionists, not free […]

Based on his Sunday column on health care, he would probably buy it. Mankiw touts the benefits of modern medicine, specifically noting how statins may allow him to control the heart disease that took the life of his father. He notes that statins cost a great deal to develop and then asks whether the government […]

The NYT has an article on the proposal to tax higher cost health care plans in Senator Max Baucus’ health care proposal. One of the main points is that rising insurance premiums could eventually make most policies subject to the tax, which has a cutoff indexed to the overall inflation rate. While this is true, […]

The Washington Post beats up on a book on globalization by Jon Jeter, a former WAPO reporter. The book is largely critical of the recent course of globalization, the reviewer clearly less so. In the last paragraph the reviewer takes Jeter to task for praising Chile’s globalization with a human face, without mentioning, among other […]

In an editorial condemning the temporary tariffs on Chinese tires, the NYT comments that China: “maintains its currency at suspiciously low values against the dollar, artificially cheapening the cost of its exports to the United States.” What is “suspicious” in this story? China maintains a managed exchange rate which is far below market levels. As […]

The NYT reports on efforts to limit the corruption of medical research by preventing articles ghost authored by drug companies from appearing in medical research. It would have been worth noting that this problem would not exist in the absence of the enormous rents that drug companies earn from patent monopolies. These rents give the […]

The NYT felt the need to present at length the unanswered complaints from Representative John Kline about a bill eliminating federal subsidies for private lenders in the college student loan program. The article concludes with Mr. Kline calling the bill “job-killing legislation,” Of course legislation that eliminates waste will kill some jobs. Suppose we had […]