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, thereby discouraging their consumption.

If goods can just be imported from countries that have no tax on GHG, then the point of cap-and-trade is undermined, as goods that require large amounts of fossil fuels will just be produced abroad. It is understandable that importers and other special interest would be opposed to measures that prohibit this sort of evasion, but that has absolutely nothing to do with "free trade."

Baker notes that "the NYT completely misrepresents the issue by implying that this is somehow a debate over principles of free trade," when really "it is a debate of whether special interests will be allowed to import goods to undermine the limits set by a cap-and-trade bill for GHG emissions." For more on press distortions of Obama's cap-and-trade policies, listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Mike Lillis on Climate Bill" (5/22/09).

Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/20/09) has requested you try to "imagine a front-page Washington Post article that talked about how the United States had a shortage of small cars." He reasonable assumes such a piece would address "the limited capacity of the various small-car assembly plants" and "discuss the amount of lead time needed to build new plants. It would also talk about the need to raise small-car prices because it is so much more profitable to build big cars":

Imagine that the article never once mentioned the possibility of importing small cars. That's the front-page Washington Post (a.k.a. "Fox on 15th") editorial warning readers that "Primary-Care Doctor Shortage May Undermine Reform Efforts."

Yes, the United States already has a shortage of primary-care physicians. Any serious reform plan will make this shortage worse by cutting back our excessive reliance on specialists. However, primary-care physicians can be trained (to our standards) anywhere in the world. There are millions of very smart people in the developing world who would be delighted to train to U.S. standards and work for the $170,000 year (net of malpractice insurance) that our primary -care physicians. (Developing countries could train 2-3 physicians for everyone that came to the United States if we placed a modest tax [e.g., 10 percent] on the earnings of foreign-trained physicians and repatriated it to the home country.)

"Writing about the potential to increase the number of foreign-trained primary-care physicians in the United States by removing legal and professional barriers," Baker tells us, would only be possible "if the Post were not such an ardently protectionist newspaper.... However, trade never even enters the Post's discussion. It was only interested in telling readers about problems with President Obama's healthcare plan."