Dean Baker

In its top of hour news segment today, Morning Edition joined the media chorus telling us that the minimum wage hike could increase unemployment and prolong the recession. (Here’s USA Today’s entry.) There is no doubt that employers of low-wage earners are unhappy about paying higher wages, just as they are unhappy about the rise […]

Way back on Monday, NYT columnist David Brooks was complaining that the tax surcharge on the wealthy proposed in the House health care bill would raise the marginal tax rates for high-end families above 50 percent in states with high income taxes. He warned that wealthy families in California and New York would be paying […]

Apparently word has not gotten out to the WSJ. An article discussing job loss and the prospect of a jobless recovery never noted the issue. In fact, those of us with access to the secret data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (i.e. Internet users), know that average weekly hours have fallen by 2.4 […]

The NYT told readers that PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry’s trade group, had built: “a compelling public policy argument on behalf of prescription drugs: they account for only 10 percent of the nation’s health care spending. They help people avoid hospitalization and other more costly medical treatments and their profits pay for research and innovation that […]

The NYT discussed the debate over providing extensive periods of data exclusivity to biotech drugs in order to prevent generic competition. As the article notes, prescriptions of biotech often sell for tens of thousands of dollars per year. While the article discusses the debate over the best length for periods of exclusivity, it does not […]

This minor point might have been worth noting in a piece discussing the Fed’s efforts to prevent more congressional oversight. The Fed’s decision to let the housing bubble grow unchecked was the cause of the current economic disaster, leading to a cumulative loss in output that is likely to exceed $5 trillion ($17,000 per person). […]

That is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package “with borrowed money.” This is not the only peculiar item in his column. He also claims that only 11 percent of the stimulus will be spent in the first seven months of the program. CBO puts the figure at […]

Robert Samuelson told readers that: “the CBO estimated that nearly 30 percent of the economic effects would occur after 2010.” Actually, this refers to fiscal year 2010, which ends on September 30, 2010. If we assume that spending in the fourth quarter of 2010 continues at the same rate as during the fiscal year, then […]

Suppose we decided that we wanted to discourage the consumption of alcohol so that we taxed all alcohol products manufactured in the United States. Then, realizing that people will simply switch to buying untaxed alcohol produced overseas, we start taxing alcohol that is imported from countries that don’t put their own tax on the manufacture […]

Truly incredible story. This is what newspapers are supposed to do. –Dean Baker