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Dean Baker

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Social Security, Like Peter Peterson, Is Draining Resources From the Federal Budget

Dean BakerApr 08, 2010
The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) told readers that: "Social Security is already draining resources from the broader federal budget, as spending on benefits has risen above this year's Social Security tax collections." Yes, Social Security benefit payments exceed the money currently being collected in Social Security taxes. The gap is being made up by the interest it earns on the $2.5 trillion in government bonds held in the Social Security trust fund. It is peculiar to describe spending money from its interest earning (or for that matter the bonds themselves) as "draining resources from the broader federal budget." However, if that is the standard the Post wants to use, then we should say that any individual or entity that draws interest from the federal government on bonds it holds is also "draining resources from the federal budget." This means that billionaire Wall Street investment banker and long-time foe of Social Security Peter Peterson is also draining resources...

10 Percent at the WSJ Isn't the Same as 10 Percent for the Rest of Us

Dean BakerApr 08, 2010
That is the only thing that readers can conclude from a statement in an article on Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's urgings to reduce the deficit. The WSJ told readers that: "The government is running a budget deficit in excess of about $1.3 trillion, more than 10% of the nation's total economic output." Of course, the Commerce Department is telling us that GDP for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $14.5 trillion, which would mean that the deficit is less than 9.0 percent of GDP. This trouble with numbers carries over to the substance of the piece which is supposed to be that the country faces an imminent crisis in being able to sell its debt. It warns readers that: "yields on 10-year Treasury notes have risen from around 3.25% in late November to just under 3.9% today, in part because of concerns in credit markets about the mountains of government debt investors are being asked to buy to fund U.S deficits." Hmmm, we are paying 3.9 interest because there are concerns in...

Globalization and the Green Economy: China Provides Expertise to the U.S.

Dean BakerApr 08, 2010
The NYT reports that China's government signed a deal with the state of California and General Electric to provide engineering expertise and high tech parts for the construction of high-speed rail. This is a fascinating and totally predictable story which cause great pain to many purveyors of the economic conventional wisdom (CW). China has been building high-speed trains, the United States hasn't. This means that the country has substantially more expertise in this area than the United States. As a result the transfer of this green technology will go from China to the United States, the opposite direction assumed by purveyors of the CW. More generally, this story shows the absurdity of the assumption of the purveyors of the CW that somehow the U.S. will transfer all its grunt work (i.e. manufacturing) to the developing world and leave the high tech stuff for our smart workers. The reality is that the developing world has hundreds of millions of smart workers who are able to do...

Did the Media Miss the Bubble? Did Saddam Lose His Last War?

Dean BakerApr 07, 2010
Steven Pearlstein often has insightful columns, not today. He discusses a conference he attended in which a repeated theme was how the media contributed to the crisis with its poor reporting. He then comments: "although it's a bit overdone, I'll admit there is a dollop of truth in it." A "dollop?" How about an enormous ocean full of truth to it and Pearlstein continues to contribute to the crisis today by covering up the earlier failure. He tells readers that: "Three years after the onset of what was then thought of as the "subprime crisis," there remarkably is still no consensus on why it happened, who is to blame, how necessary the government bailouts were and what needs to be done to prevent such a cataclysm from happening again. Over time, the issues have been overwhelmed by populist anger, infused with political ideology, distorted by partisan maneuvering and special-interest pleading, and ultimately eclipsed by economic recovery." Yeah, it's all really really complicated. Except...

They Still Haven't Heard of Patents at the NYT

Dean BakerApr 07, 2010
David Leonhardt had a column discussing overuse of expensive medical care in the NYT today. Remarkably, this discussion did not mention the effect of patents in complicated decisions on treatment and raising costs. Patents are essential to this discussion for two reasons. First, drugs and medical tests that are very expensive are generally expensive because of government granted patent monopolies, not their inherent cost. For example, a new generation of cancer drugs that can cost tens of thousands per year would be relatively cheap in the absence of patent protection. These drugs were expensive to develop, but once they have been developed, the production is cheap. By forcing patients to pay the high patent protected price, an otherwise simple decision (use the cheap drug) can instead be made very complicated. The other reason why patents play such an important role in this discussion is that they give a party (the patent holder) a huge stake in misrepresenting the issues. Because...

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