Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian Unlimited (UK), and his blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting. His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times, and the New York Daily News. He received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan.
Baker is author of many books, including Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (Polipoint Press, 2009); The United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006).
Celebrate the Defeat of the Granny Bashers!
It isn't often that progressives in the United States have much to celebrate. After all, the news has swung between bad and worse for most of the last three decades. That is why we should be celebrating the victory over the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its efforts to ...
Tax Games and Redistributing Income Upward
The corporate profit share of national income is near a post-World War II high. The share of income going to the richest 1 percent is almost at its pre-Depression peak. These would seem like impressive accomplishments but the process of upward redistribution, from Joe Sixpack to Joe Six Houses, is ...
Timothy Geithner Saved Wall Street, Not the Economy
The accolades for Timothy Geithner came on so thick and heavy in the last week that it's necessary for those of us in the reality-based community to bring the discussion back to earth. The basic facts of the matter are very straightforward. Timothy Geithner and the bailout he helped engineer ...
Michigan Republicans Deny Police Officers and Firefighters the Right to Work
That is what the headlines would say if anyone really believed that the anti-union laws passed last week in Michigan actually had anything to do with the rights of workers. When the legislature outlawed contracts requiring workers who benefit from union representation to pay for that representation, it explicitly exempted ...
The Serious People Are on the War Path
Fans of arithmetic everywhere know that the large deficits of the last five years are the result of the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. But those taking part in deficit discussions in Washington won't allow such numbers into the discussion. The Serious People in Washington, ...
The wrecking society: Economics today
There is an old story from the heyday of the Soviet Union. As part of their May Day celebrations they were parading their latest weapon systems down the street in front of the Kremlin. There was a long column of their newest tanks, followed by a row of tractors pulling ...
Poverty: The New Growth Industry in America
Recent trends in poverty rates should have the country furious at its leaders. When we get the data for 2011 next month, we are likely to see yet another uptick in poverty rates, reversing almost 50 years of economic progress. The percentage of people in extreme poverty, with incomes less ...
'Courage' in Washington Doesn't Have the Same Meaning
Last week Vice President Joe Biden did a courageous thing, he promised an audience in southern Virginia that there will be no cuts whatsoever to Social Security in a second Obama Administration. He used the strongest possible language, telling customers at a local diner: "I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, ...
Rep. Paul Ryan's Far-Right Agenda: The Media Can't Take the Truth
In principle, the country faces a choice this fall between a moderate conservative, President Obama, and Governor Romney, an extreme conservative who wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare and eliminate most of the services that the public expects from the federal government. The reason why this choice only exists ...
The CEO Plan to Steal Your Social Security and Medicare
Many people are following the presidential election closely with the idea that the outcome will have a major impact on national policy. However, according to Steven Pearlstein, a veteran Washington Post columnist and reporter, it may not matter who wins the election. In a column last week, Pearlstein told readers ...
California Gold Rush? Righting Underwater Mortgages
Ever since the housing bubble collapsed, the Federal government has refused to take major initiatives to help underwater homeowners. As a result, we are likely to see close to one million foreclosures both this year and next, with the numbers only gradually slipping back to normal levels by the end ...
Millions of people across the US East Coast are sweltering in near record temperatures. In the Washington area, tens of thousands have been dealing with the heat without air conditioning or power due to a storm the prior weekend. The remarkable part of this story is that almost no one ...
Why Americans should work less – the way Germans do
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, a distinguished British economist, took the lead last week in drafting a sign-on "Manifesto for Economic Common Sense", condemning the turn toward austerity in many countries. This manifesto seems destined to garner tens or even hundreds of thousands of signatures, including mine. While ...
A Wall Street Gambling Tax: The Remedy to Inequality
As the presidential election builds up steam, the Washington elites in both parties are actively scheming to find ways to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for retired workers. The media have widely reported on efforts to slip through a version of the deficit reduction plan developed by Morgan Stanley ...
Liberals Working for the Right
Last week Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent picked up on a blogpost from Democracy editor Michael Tomasky about how liberals should be touting the merits of "government." That is a great idea, if the point is to advance the conservatives' agenda. It is astounding how happy liberals are to work ...
Washington, DC - There is a renewed drum beat in the media about the coming crisis in both the United States and elsewhere of an ageing population. The story goes that we will have too few workers to support a growing population of retirees - scary stuff. While this is probably ...
Mortgage and Securitization Fraud: Where Is the Task Force?
It was almost four years ago that Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paul Paulson and then New York Fed Bank President Timothy Geithner ran to Congress warning that the end of the world was near. They told members of Congress that the banks were drowning in ...
Deficit Reduction: The Great Distraction
This is the week of the third annual Deficit Fest, the event sponsored by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson. At this event, many of the people most responsible for the current downturn come together to tell us why we should be worried about the deficit at a time when ...
Bernie Sanders Advocates a Free Market in AIDS Drugs
Drugs are cheap. Patent monopolies are expensive. These are simple facts that everyone should know but for some reason few do. The point here is simple; the vast majority of drugs are cheap to produce. Chain drug stores sell hundreds of generic drugs for $5-$7 per prescription. They can do ...
Mitt Romney's Partner in Crime: Ed Conrad's Unintended Consequences
It's standard practice during the election campaign for presidential candidates to publish an autobiographical account of their rise to stardom or their philosophy of life and politics. However in keeping with his commitment to innovative business practices, it seems that Mitt Romney has outsourced this task to Ed Conrad, one ...
Budget Bunk: The Old Pox on Both Your Houses Game
In Washington all serious people routinely write columns in which they set themselves above the political fray and pronounce the Republicans and Democrats equally to blame for political gridlock and all that they see wrong with the world. Today, it is my turn. Of course beating up on the Republicans ...
Killing the Messenger: The Downsizing and Death of the Postal Service
It is fashionable to think of the postal service as an antiquated relic of a different era in the same way that all right-thinking people regarded standard 30-year fixed rate mortgages as old-fashioned at the peak of the housing bubble. Many of the same people who assured us that we ...
Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Bowles-Simpson Commission Report
Parents often find it useful to tell their children about nonexistent creatures to instill habits of good behavior. It seems that many political leaders are going the same route. How else can one explain the repeated references to the Bowles-Simpson commission report and its advice to the country on how ...
What If the Next Steve Jobs Is Chinese?
As Apple's stock continues to hit record highs and its sales and profit reports exceed all expectations, Steve Jobs' reputation as an entrepreneurial genius grows ever larger. He succeeded in developing products that people around the world very much want to buy. In this sense, Jobs stands out from the ...
Policy Follies in the Housing Market: The First-Time Homebuyers Tax Credit
The right is very good at making progressives pay for their mistakes. They still trot out failed programs from the '60s as a warning of the risks of wrongheaded liberalism. Unfortunately, the left cannot hold a grudge the same way; otherwise the folks who started the war in Iraq and ...
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June 19th, 2013
Celebrate the Defeat of the Granny Bashers!
It isn't often that progressives in the United States have much to celebrate. After all, the news has swung between bad and worse for most ...
February 5th, 2013
Tax Games and Redistributing Income Upward
The corporate profit share of national income is near a post-World War II high. The share of income going to the richest 1 percent is ...
January 30th, 2013
Timothy Geithner Saved Wall Street, Not the Economy
The accolades for Timothy Geithner came on so thick and heavy in the last week that it's necessary for those of us in the reality-based ...
December 19th, 2012
Michigan Republicans Deny Police Officers and Firefighters the Right to Work
That is what the headlines would say if anyone really believed that the anti-union laws passed last week in Michigan actually had anything to do ...
December 3rd, 2012
The Serious People Are on the War Path
Fans of arithmetic everywhere know that the large deficits of the last five years are the result of the economic downturn caused by the collapse ...
October 15th, 2012
The wrecking society: Economics today
There is an old story from the heyday of the Soviet Union. As part of their May Day celebrations they were parading their latest weapon ...
September 2nd, 2012
Poverty: The New Growth Industry in America
Recent trends in poverty rates should have the country furious at its leaders. When we get the data for 2011 next month, we are likely ...
February 18th, 2011
Unions badgering Wisconsin's finances?
You have to give Gov. Walker and his wealthy patrons credit. Here we have a situation where Wall Street fat cats wrecked the economy - ...
July 21st, 2011
The Drive to Cut Social Security: Why Are the Gang of Six Scared of Information?
A central theme of the Gang of Six's deficit reduction crusade is lowering the annual cost of living for Social Security. They propose to change ...
August 21st, 2012
'Courage' in Washington Doesn't Have the Same Meaning
Last week Vice President Joe Biden did a courageous thing, he promised an audience in southern Virginia that there will be no cuts whatsoever to ...
October 18th, 2010
Foreclosure Moratorium: Cracking Down on Liar Liens
As we all know, there is a major philosophical divide in US politics. On the one hand, there are those who think it is the ...
July 28th, 2011
President Obama Doesn't Understand the Origins of the Deficit
That is what he told the country in his address on Monday night. President Obama described a situation in which the government had been perpetually ...
August 31st, 2011
Do Liberals Have to Be Losers?
National political discussion of the economics and budgets over the last two decades have been dominated by the debate over President Clinton's tax increase and ...
August 29th, 2011
President Obama's job creation mirage
President Obama has discovered how serious the recession is. That's what he told an audience in Chicago last week. To be fair, he was referring ...
'The East'
Why have you started a comedy festival in northern Michigan in the middle of winter?
Because if you were here in the dead of winter in the middle of nowhere (which is actually somewhere to us), you'd need a few laughs too ... Continue Reading
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Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow Show, 2/27/12
