dean baker

Dean Baker recently posted on the closed door meetings some prominent CEOs are having on shaping austerity budgets to be used after the election to pressure Congress to arrive at a bi-partisan compromise that will cut spending much more than it raises taxes and “p more »

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This is the third and last installment of a critical review of Dean Baker's second reaction to the debate kicked off by the more »

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This is the second installment of a critical review of Dean Baker's second reaction to the debate kicked off by the more »

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Dean Baker added to his previous discussion on MMT in a second post in reply to some of the comments on his first one. more »

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Dean Baker weighed in on MMT in the aftermath of Dylan Matthews's, MMT post on Ezra Kle more »

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Giving companies money does not mean they'll hire. more »

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The word for today is "choice," not "crisis."

It's time to stop saying the country "can't afford" Medicare, Social Security, or other programs that benefit the middle class. If I told my mother that I "can't mow the lawn" or "I can't do all that homework" when I was a kid, she'd say: "Don't say you can't. Say you don't want to." (The outcome of these exchanges was inevitable. Hello, lawnmower ...)

Now we're told there's a "crisis" and we can no longer afford the middle-class American dream. The truth is the opposite: Our long-term problems aren't caused by the middle class, but by politicians who choose to sacrifice the middle class for wealthy interests.

All this talk about a "debt crisis" is a way for politicians to avoid telling the truth: They'd rather say they "have to" sacrifice the middle class than admit they're making a choice.

"It Needs to Happen"

A comment today from Sen. Tom Coburn reflects the 'crisis mentality' masking today's choices. Sen. Coburn reportedly withdrew from the "Gang of Six" Senators trying to craft a budget-cutting deal. According to a report in the National Journal, Coburn said the Senators "can't bridge the gap between what actually needs to happen and what people will allow to happen."

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This weekend the New York Times ran what seemed to be a somewhat overly flattering piece about right-wing anti-entitlement hawk Pete Peterson, and the piece included this paragraph:

Progressives like Mr. Baker or Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future often paint Mr. Peterson as a disingenuous tycoon who made his fortune from the low carried-interest tax rate (it allows hedge-fund operators to shield earnings from the government). They argue that Social Security’s trust fund — while supplied with Treasury bonds, not dollar bills — will nonetheless stay solvent for decades, and accuse Mr. Peterson of shrewdly couching entitlement reform as a way to protect future generations when, in fact, it is today’s elderly who will suffer.

That would be Dean Baker, prominent economist, who describes Peterson with considerable accuracy:

"“He’s not focused on the debt so much as on cutting Social Security and Medicare,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research. “Even in the late ’90s, when we had a surplus, he was saying the same thing and the debt wasn’t in any obvious way a problem then.”

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Sometimes our political commentariat seems to go fashion-crazy. When a new trend gets popular it overwhelms everything in its path: logic, poltical divisions, even expert opinion. The latest vogue is deficit reduction, and our nation's Anna Wintours tell us we simply have to have it. In Washington, screaming about being in the red is the new black. more »

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The organizers of AmericaSpeaks, tomorrow's "town hall meeting"/media event designed to focus attention on budget-cutting, have issued a document called "Myths & Facts About AmericaSpeaks: Our Budget, Our Economy." A number of excellent pieces have already been written about the slanted point of view in their materials, which are d more »

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