Dean Baker

How many NYT readers know how large $500 million is as a share of California’s budget? How about $370 million a share of Texas’ budget. My guess is that almost no one outside of the people who live in these states (and probably not even many of them) has any clue as to how large […]

It seems that a condition of being a source on the housing market for NPR is having missed the housing bubble. Morning Edition ran a piece on President Obama’s new housing plan in which Mark Zandi claimed that a main benefit was that it could stop the decline in house prices. Since there continues to […]

It seems that they haven’t. When discussing the cause of foreclosures the Post told readers that the Obama administration’s new housing plan takes aim at: “the major cause of the current wave of foreclosures: “the spike in unemployment. While the initial mortgage crisis that erupted three years ago resulted from millions of risky home loans […]

The NYT reports on a new plan from the Obama administration to help homeowners. According to the article, under the plan the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) will guarantee new loans in exchange for banks writing down some of the principle on underwater mortgages. It would have been worth pointing out that the FHA is currently […]

That seems to be the argument of a Washington Post article that reports that firms are finding ways to increase output without hiring more workers. Of course firms are always finding ways to increase output without hiring more workers, this is called “productivity growth.” Rather than being a problem, productivity growth is a good thing. […]

That is the implication of its complaint that getting private financial companies out of the government insured student loan business will cause it to shed 2,500 jobs. Since the government is not hiring new employees to deal with the extra business, the implication is that these people were unnecessary paper pushers. This move by the […]

That should have been the lead to an NPR piece following up a Morning Edition interview with New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg. Senator Gregg, who is often held up as a thoughtful fiscal conservative, concluded his interview by asserting that the health care bill approved by Congress would increase the size of government from 20 […]

Serious newspapers don’t pull down ghosts from the sky to present their views to readers. However, in an article discussing the implications of the health care plan, the NYT told readers:”many have come to believe that the system [Social Security] must change or go broke, the battle Mr. Bush fought and lost in 2005.” Of […]

That is what can be concluded from its decision to call the Treasury bonds held by the Social Security trust fund “IOUs.” This is not the normal term applied to government bonds in the New York Times or anywhere else. This is a pejorative term that has the effect of undermining the credibility of the […]

While rightly blaming Greenspan for the economic downturn, Robert Samuelson gets a few things wrong in his Post column. First, he attributes the revitalization of the U.S. economy to the end of the double-digit inflation of the 70s. Actually, most of the drop in inflation had been completed by the early 80s. However, there was […]