Rep. Paul Ryan is the Republican leader most often touted as a seriouspolicy wonk.His plan to "fix" Social Security was recently evaluated by the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration. As the Washington Post notes inan article today (10/21/10), Ryan's plan"would slice initial benefits by about a quarter for middle-income Americans who turn 65 in 2050." So why is the Post's headline "Republican Rep. Ryan's Social Security Plan Would Cut Benefits for High Earners"? While it is true that the wealthy would see benefit cuts,it would seem moreimportant to notehow his plan wouldaffect most people. Economist Dean Baker (Beat [...]
Oct
11
2010
WPost: The Midterms and 'Big Government'
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Sunday's Washington Post (10/10/10)featured a story by Jon Cohen and Dan Balz that led with this claim: If there is an overarching theme of election 2010, it is the question of how big the government should be and how far it should reach into people's lives. The piece is actually an explanation of the results of a newpoll conducted by the Post along with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. As Dean Baker noted (10/10/10), "There is absolutely nothing in this article that supports this assertion." He is correct. The Post's report deals with the supposedly conflicted nature of [...]
Apr
26
2010
The IMF to the Rescue?
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A Washington Post article (4/23/10) about the International Monetary Fund focused on the advice it is offering for the United States. The piece notes that this is somewhat unusual. Even stranger, though, is the Post's description of IMF officials as folks who "have a long history of stabilizing economies and solving global financial problems." This might come as news to those who've been on the receiving end of the IMF's advice. As economist Dean Baker put it at his Beat the Press blog (which has a new home at cepr.net–bookmark it!): Back in the '90s, the IMF came to be [...]
Sep
07
2009
WaPo Alarmed: Japan Health Insurance Actually Insures
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A September 7 Washington Post report on Japanese healthcare claims that "more than one-third of the workers' premiums are used to transfer wealth from the young, healthy and rich to the old, unhealthy and poor." Which Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/7/09) understatedly calls "a striking statement": Fire insurance transfers wealth from people who don't have house fires to people who do. Car insurance transfers money from people who don't have car accidents to people who do. This is the basic concept of insurance. It protects people from bad events, transferring money from people who don't have bad events to [...]
Aug
24
2009
WaPo Pundit: Mass Transit Good for Others, Not U.S.
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"Robert Samuelson Doesn't Like Trains" is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be "the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense." In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama's "Rail Boondoggle," Samuelson trots out the tired argument against "almost $35 billion in subsidies into Amtrak" that "the federal government has poured" in the last four decades–with the usual corporate pundit omissions, like the fact that, as long ago as 1994 it was determined that "hidden subsidies for drivers amount to well over [...]
Aug
10
2009
At WaPo, 'Others Tell Readers What "Populists" Think'
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Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/9/09) sees the Washington Post as simply "keeping with its strict editorial policy of only letting others tell readers what 'populists' think," when publishing its August 9 "front-page article on setting executive compensation at banks receiving bailout money"–one which "never presented the views of an actual populist." Instead, Baker writes "readers got to see the comment of Robert Profusek, a lawyer at Jones Day who is identified as having advised major banks on compensation matters," and Linda Rappaport, "head of the executive compensation practice at the firm Shearman & Sterling"–both of whom unsurprisingly argue [...]
Aug
05
2009
WaPo Argues: Censor Blog for Sending Us Readers
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Quipping that "usually newspapers are big defenders of free speech, but not the Washington Post," economic reporting critic Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/2/09) takes down the paper's recent piece giving over "nearly 2,000 words to complain that a website had ripped off" one reporter's story. Careful to say that "the problem was not that the website had plagiarized the piece"–indeed, the "story was credited and even linked to by the website, which was a major source of readers for the original article"–Baker tells us that the Post "is upset that the website may have made money off his work, [...]
Jul
23
2009
NYT's David Brooks Scares Up More False Figures
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Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/21/09) has synopsized the latest fiasco of a David Brooks column under the headline "David Brooks Wanted Tax Increases to Pay for Stimulus"–since, Baker writes, "that is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package 'with borrowed money.'" Predictably, "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." Even though, as economist Baker explains, the "Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at 20 percent, which doesn't seem [...]
Jul
14
2009
Ben Stein and NYT 'Get Really Seriously Wrong'
Stating quite succinctly how "there is an ongoing issue about whether global warming deniers should be treated seriously by the media, given that they have about as much scientific support for their position as the flat-Earth crew," economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/11/09) notes how the July 11 "New York Times goes them one better in finding a global warming ignorer": Apparently, Ben Stein has never heard about global warming. How else can someone interpret this paragraph: I don't believe we need to do something radical about energy, but even assuming that we do, why do it right now? [...]
Jul
09
2009
When Corporate Media Report on Corporate Medicine
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Writing at his regular Beat the Press blog (7/8/09), economist Dean Baker says that the New York Times' David Leonhardt "rightly complains that President Obama's healthcare plan does nothing to change the incentives for doctors to prescribe expensive forms of care, even when there is no evidence that this care will lead to better outcomes." But "Leonhardt fails to take the extra step and ask why this care is expensive": In most cases, the care is more expensive because it involves expensive medical equipment and drugs, with a healthy dash of high doctors' fees as well. The reason that medical [...]
Jul
02
2009
Climate Bill Damned but Military Budget Untouchable
Reacting to media noise over the economic costs of the Waxman-Markey environmental bill currently before the U.S. Congress, Dean Baker (ZNet, 7/1/09) looks to the damages of a different annual spending bill, this one perpetually unexamined in corporate news: Global Insight projected that after 20 years of higher defense spending, annual car sales would be down by more than 700,000. Housing starts would be almost 40,000 lower. Exports would be 1.8 percent lower and imports would be 2.7 percent higher, leading to a trade deficit that was almost $200 billion larger. The model also projected that there would be nearly [...]
Jun
29
2009
Climate Change Secondary to 'Free' Trade at NYT
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Tying the urgent present-day topic of economic reporting in with the most pressing global emergency of climate change, Dean Baker has posted at his Beat the Press blog (6/29/09) on "What Does 'Free Trade' Have to Do With Taxing Greenhouse Gas Emissions?": That is the question that the New York Times should have been asking in an article that reported President Obama's opposition to taxing imported items from countries that have not taken steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The point of his cap-and-trade program is to make items that require large amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions more expensive, [...]
