Economic Policy

Austin Goolsbee tells us in his NYT column that the proliferation of reality TV shows is the price that we pay for the greater diversity of television offerings. The argument is that it is expensive to develop a scripted show, and with the audience now splintered among hundreds of cable and satellite channels, it is […]

The media report that the stock market rallied yesterday in response to the good economic news released that day. It cited the release of new data on durable goods orders and new house sales. I wonder if I was looking at the same reports. The Commerce Department’s data did show better than expected durable good […]

Some folks may have caught the NYT headline on an article reporting on March existing home sales, “Sales of Previously Owned Homes Plunge to 1989 Level.” This is a case of headline writers gone wild. The point that he/she was trying to make is that this was the sharpest one month drop in home sales […]

The NYT has an article about recent changes in Turkey’s society and economy in which it asserts that “the economy has nearly doubled in the four years that the AK [the ruling Islamic party] has been in power, largely because it has stuck to an economic program prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.” According to […]

The NYT reports on OSHA’s look the other way approach to the enforcement of workplace safety. This is what newspapers are supposed to do. –Dean Baker

In its article on the run-off in the French presidential election, the Post tells readers that Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate, wants to cut taxes by $90 billion over the next ten years. That’s a really useful number. I’m sure that all of the Post’s readers know the size of the French economy and budget, […]

The Wall Street Journal told readers today that, according to the SS trustees, it would take a 16 percent increase in Social Security taxes to make the program solvent over its 75-year planning period. Most people don’t know that the current size of the SS tax is 12.4 percent (6.2 percent on both the employee […]

In its obituary for Boris Yeltsin, the NYT told readers that “Mr. Yeltsin�s actions ensured that there would be no turning back to the centralized Soviet command economy, which had strangled growth and reduced a country of talented and cultured people and rich in natural resources to a beggar among nations.” According to the Penn […]

A Post business columnist implicitly assumed that price to earnings ratios for the stock market will go far above the bubble peaks of 2000, at least if we take seriously the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates of corporate profits. The column assumed that 401(k) accounts would provide a nominal return averaging 10 percent annually over the […]

Okay, I’m writing this one in anger. The Washington Post printed a letter today from Richard Berman, the executive director of the Center for Union Facts [think business front group], that attacked a study that we did on the probability that an activist would be fired in a union organizing campaign. The letter claimed that […]