Dean Baker

Dean Baker

  • Immigration crackdown

    Many of us have been following the inflation data closely for evidence of Trump’s tariffs. Along with most other economists I have been...

  • Interest hikes

    Catherine Rampell’s latest Washington Post column argued that lower-income people have been hardest hit by inflation, so they will benefit most if...

  • Loud chorus

    There is a loud and growing chorus demanding that the Fed follow a path of aggressive rate hikes, which will inevitably lead to higher unemployment...

  • Accurate representation

    It was very frustrating to read Noam Scheiber’s profile of Jaz Brisack, the person who led the first successful union organizing drive at a...

  • Wage-price spiral

    That’s the question millions are asking, or hopefully at least the folks at the Fed making decisions on interest rates. Ostensibly, the Fed is...

  • Giving the rich all of our money

    There are legitimate debates over what tax rates should be, even if many of us consider the current tax rates on the rich and super-rich far too...

  • Pricing matters

    This week President Biden announced that he would release 1 million barrels per day from the strategic oil reserves. This action was generally...

  • No driving

    From my Twitter feed it seems that Sarah Palin has been resurrected. All sorts of centrist-liberal types are yelling ‘drill baby, drill!’ as a...

  • Omicron news

    At this point, we still don’t know very much about the Omicron variant, except that it spreads far more quickly than the Delta variant. The data...

  • It won’t go away

    Politicians in Washington tend to be a pretty arrogant group. They think they can just define their own terms and expect everyone else just to...

  • Problem in economics

    The release of the new Social Security Trustees Report, coupled with a New York Times article on what strikes me as a rather silly debate on...

  • A vaccine summit

    Getting the world vaccinated is not about some feel-good gestures, like a few billion dollars for COVAX, the Bill Gates-inspired initiative to make...

  • Economic optimism

    More than 20 percent of workers now report that they are working from home at least part-time as a result of the pandemic. While many of these...

  • The vaccine rollout

    The vaccine rollout process has been painfully slow in the United States. More than 40 days after the first vaccine was approved for emergency use...

  • Lost jobs

    The economy lost 140,000 jobs in December, all of which can be attributed to a plunge in restaurant employment of 372,000. Other sectors highly...

  • Covid-19 and the lost GDP

    Some folks have complained about the loss of GDP over the last five months and questioned whether the shutdowns have been worth the price. While...

  • No recession for 2020

    These days the business press is full of predictions of recessions. This could get people worried, except that the track record of economists in...

  • The population story

    A theme often repeated in the media is that Japan is suffering terribly because of its low birth rates and shrinking population. This has meant slow...

  • The next recession

    With the New Year and the US recovery soon to be record-breaking in duration, many are asking when the next recession is likely to come and what...

  • The bank bailout

    This week marked 10 years since the harrowing descent into the financial crisis – when the huge investment bank Lehman Bros went into bankruptcy,...