Dana Milbank had a column in the paper with the headline, “Is it really ethical to expect Tom Price to fly coach?” (The title is slightly different in the online edition.) The problem with this title is that the issue is not whether Price should fly coach or first class, the issue is his use of private jets for government travel.
People reading the piece would learn this fact, but of course, a large percent of readers will only see the headline. (Since this is a Dana Milbank column, that is likely to be a very large percent.) These readers will think this is a relatively trivial point about whether cabinet secretaries should be able to fly first class, as opposed to the actual issue of taking a private plane, which might cost one hundred times as much.
Dana Milbank had a column in the paper with the headline, “Is it really ethical to expect Tom Price to fly coach?” (The title is slightly different in the online edition.) The problem with this title is that the issue is not whether Price should fly coach or first class, the issue is his use of private jets for government travel.
People reading the piece would learn this fact, but of course, a large percent of readers will only see the headline. (Since this is a Dana Milbank column, that is likely to be a very large percent.) These readers will think this is a relatively trivial point about whether cabinet secretaries should be able to fly first class, as opposed to the actual issue of taking a private plane, which might cost one hundred times as much.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
Well, sort of, at least you can say that if the NYT columnist had any idea of what he was talking about. Friedman filled his column today with typical Friedmanesque nonsense, which included this paragraph:
“We’re going through a change in the ‘climate’ of globalization — going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one, from a world of walls where you build your wealth by hoarding the most resources to a world of webs where you build your wealth by having the most connections to the flow of ideas, networks, innovators and entrepreneurs. In this interdependent world, connectivity leads to prosperity and isolation leads to poverty. We got rich by being ‘America Connected’ not ‘America First’ (emphasis in original).”
If it’s actually the case that we build wealth by “having the most connections” and not having walls and hoarding, then we certainly should be opposed to patent and copyright monopolies. These monopolies, which often take the form of walls (paywalls), are quite explicitly designed to limit connections. They are hoarding.
Of course, Mr. Friedman has probably never given a moment’s thought to the efficiency of patent and copyright protection in the modern world. After all, he is not expected to have serious ideas on important issues, he is just a newspaper columnist.
Well, sort of, at least you can say that if the NYT columnist had any idea of what he was talking about. Friedman filled his column today with typical Friedmanesque nonsense, which included this paragraph:
“We’re going through a change in the ‘climate’ of globalization — going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one, from a world of walls where you build your wealth by hoarding the most resources to a world of webs where you build your wealth by having the most connections to the flow of ideas, networks, innovators and entrepreneurs. In this interdependent world, connectivity leads to prosperity and isolation leads to poverty. We got rich by being ‘America Connected’ not ‘America First’ (emphasis in original).”
If it’s actually the case that we build wealth by “having the most connections” and not having walls and hoarding, then we certainly should be opposed to patent and copyright monopolies. These monopolies, which often take the form of walls (paywalls), are quite explicitly designed to limit connections. They are hoarding.
Of course, Mr. Friedman has probably never given a moment’s thought to the efficiency of patent and copyright protection in the modern world. After all, he is not expected to have serious ideas on important issues, he is just a newspaper columnist.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
This is an important point that was left out of a NYT piece discussing Janet Yellen plans for the Federal Reserve Board’s interest rate policy. The piece gave Yellen’s comment that it would be bad policy to wait until inflation was at 2.0 percent before more aggressively raising interest rates.
While Yellen may have been using shorthand, as she has repeatedly pointed out, the Fed views the 2.0 percent average inflation as a target. The 2.0 percent figure is not viewed as a ceiling. This means that it should be prepared to tolerate and even want periods in which inflation is somewhat above 2.0 percent. Since there will be a recession at some point, and inflation is expected to fall in a recession, to maintain a 2.0 percent average inflation rate, the rate should be somewhat above 2.0 percent before the next recession.
Given this reality, the Fed has been falling substantially short of the inflation target it set for itself.
This is an important point that was left out of a NYT piece discussing Janet Yellen plans for the Federal Reserve Board’s interest rate policy. The piece gave Yellen’s comment that it would be bad policy to wait until inflation was at 2.0 percent before more aggressively raising interest rates.
While Yellen may have been using shorthand, as she has repeatedly pointed out, the Fed views the 2.0 percent average inflation as a target. The 2.0 percent figure is not viewed as a ceiling. This means that it should be prepared to tolerate and even want periods in which inflation is somewhat above 2.0 percent. Since there will be a recession at some point, and inflation is expected to fall in a recession, to maintain a 2.0 percent average inflation rate, the rate should be somewhat above 2.0 percent before the next recession.
Given this reality, the Fed has been falling substantially short of the inflation target it set for itself.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
The debate over prescription drug pricing is a great testament to how deeply propaganda can affect people’s thinkings. The NYT had a piece on lowering prescription drug prices by Jay Hancock, a reporter for Kaiser News Service.
Hancock runs through a range of mechanisms that the government can pursue to make drug prices lower. Incredibly, he never mentions what would almost certainly be the most simple route: stop making drugs expensive with patent monopolies.
Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture. The reason they are expensive is that we give drug companies patent monopolies and related protections which severely restrict competition in the market. We will spend roughly $450 billion this year on prescription drugs. If drugs were sold in a free market, without patents or related protections, these drugs would almost certainly cost less than $80 billion. The difference of $370 billion is a bit less than 2.0 percent of GDP, it is more than five times the annual food stamp budget. In other words, it is real money.
We do have to pay for the research, but there are other more efficient mechanisms, most obviously direct government funding. We currently spend more than $30 billion a year on research through the National Institutes of Health. If we tripled this figure we could likely replace the $50 billion that the industry claims to spend on research each year. (A mechanism for funding is described in my book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer [it’s free].)
Anyhow, it is incredible that the idea of not having the government grant the monopolies that make drugs expensive in the first place never even made Hancock’s list. This is not a new idea, it has been pushed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, cited as a route for future funding by a UN panel, and even considered seriously by an OECD meeting on the topic. It should at least warrant a few sentences in what is supposed to a far-reaching NYT piece on drug pricing.
The debate over prescription drug pricing is a great testament to how deeply propaganda can affect people’s thinkings. The NYT had a piece on lowering prescription drug prices by Jay Hancock, a reporter for Kaiser News Service.
Hancock runs through a range of mechanisms that the government can pursue to make drug prices lower. Incredibly, he never mentions what would almost certainly be the most simple route: stop making drugs expensive with patent monopolies.
Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture. The reason they are expensive is that we give drug companies patent monopolies and related protections which severely restrict competition in the market. We will spend roughly $450 billion this year on prescription drugs. If drugs were sold in a free market, without patents or related protections, these drugs would almost certainly cost less than $80 billion. The difference of $370 billion is a bit less than 2.0 percent of GDP, it is more than five times the annual food stamp budget. In other words, it is real money.
We do have to pay for the research, but there are other more efficient mechanisms, most obviously direct government funding. We currently spend more than $30 billion a year on research through the National Institutes of Health. If we tripled this figure we could likely replace the $50 billion that the industry claims to spend on research each year. (A mechanism for funding is described in my book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer [it’s free].)
Anyhow, it is incredible that the idea of not having the government grant the monopolies that make drugs expensive in the first place never even made Hancock’s list. This is not a new idea, it has been pushed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, cited as a route for future funding by a UN panel, and even considered seriously by an OECD meeting on the topic. It should at least warrant a few sentences in what is supposed to a far-reaching NYT piece on drug pricing.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
I have a hot tip for Washington Post reporters: politicians aren’t always honest. As a result when they say they believe something, it doesn’t mean they really believe it.
This means that the Washington Post likely misled its readers in a discussion of Republican tax cut proposals when it told them:
“Republicans believe the corporate rate cut and other incentives will stimulate economic growth, offsetting the revenue loss.”
The reality is the Washington Post’s reporters have no clue what the Republicans pushing tax cuts really believe about the impact of tax cuts on growth. If these Republicans were at all familiar with with the evidence, they would not expect their tax cuts to have much, if any, positive impact on growth.
So while it is possible that Republicans believe in something that is not true, it is possible that they are deliberately deceiving the public. It is also possible that they have no clue whatsoever about the impact of tax cuts on the economy, just as they have no clue about the impact of their health care proposals. They are simply voting as their funders are telling them to.
Newspapers are supposed to report the facts, not make them up, as the Post is doing here.
I have a hot tip for Washington Post reporters: politicians aren’t always honest. As a result when they say they believe something, it doesn’t mean they really believe it.
This means that the Washington Post likely misled its readers in a discussion of Republican tax cut proposals when it told them:
“Republicans believe the corporate rate cut and other incentives will stimulate economic growth, offsetting the revenue loss.”
The reality is the Washington Post’s reporters have no clue what the Republicans pushing tax cuts really believe about the impact of tax cuts on growth. If these Republicans were at all familiar with with the evidence, they would not expect their tax cuts to have much, if any, positive impact on growth.
So while it is possible that Republicans believe in something that is not true, it is possible that they are deliberately deceiving the public. It is also possible that they have no clue whatsoever about the impact of tax cuts on the economy, just as they have no clue about the impact of their health care proposals. They are simply voting as their funders are telling them to.
Newspapers are supposed to report the facts, not make them up, as the Post is doing here.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
Paul Krugman does a nice job dissecting the logic, or lack thereof, of Republican efforts to dismantle Obamacare. He points out that one of the games played by the Republicans is claiming that the Graham-Cassidy bill would increase Medicaid spending. It makes this claim based on the fact that nominal Medicaid spending would increase under the bill. While this is true, the bill would hugely cut spending compared with the baseline which factors in both projected increases in the number of people covered and the medical cost inflation.
It might be harder to get away with this cheap trick if papers like the New York Times used budget reporting to actually inform readers. As it is, budget reporting usually doesn’t put numbers in any context, which makes them absolutely meaningless to the vast majority of readers. This point was acknowledged a few years back by both Margaret Sullivan and David Leonhardt, who were at the time the NYT’s public editor and Washington editor.
In spite of the acknowledgment that its budget reporting does nothing to inform the vast majority of its readers, the paper has done nothing to change the practice. (Does the paper really find it hard to find reporters who know basic arithmetic?) As a result, it is much easier for Republicans to lie when they want to do something like massively cutting back Medicaid spending.
Paul Krugman does a nice job dissecting the logic, or lack thereof, of Republican efforts to dismantle Obamacare. He points out that one of the games played by the Republicans is claiming that the Graham-Cassidy bill would increase Medicaid spending. It makes this claim based on the fact that nominal Medicaid spending would increase under the bill. While this is true, the bill would hugely cut spending compared with the baseline which factors in both projected increases in the number of people covered and the medical cost inflation.
It might be harder to get away with this cheap trick if papers like the New York Times used budget reporting to actually inform readers. As it is, budget reporting usually doesn’t put numbers in any context, which makes them absolutely meaningless to the vast majority of readers. This point was acknowledged a few years back by both Margaret Sullivan and David Leonhardt, who were at the time the NYT’s public editor and Washington editor.
In spite of the acknowledgment that its budget reporting does nothing to inform the vast majority of its readers, the paper has done nothing to change the practice. (Does the paper really find it hard to find reporters who know basic arithmetic?) As a result, it is much easier for Republicans to lie when they want to do something like massively cutting back Medicaid spending.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
The Washington Post misled readers in its discussion of Republican claims that its tax cuts will lead to a large boost to GDP growth. The piece quotes Kent Smetters, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying the Republican growth projections did not take account of debt. This is wrong.
The real issue is whether the projections take account of how close the U.S. economy is to its potential level of output. If the current level of demand is near the point where the economy is hitting serious supply constraints, then the Republican tax cuts will not have much impact on growth. On the other hand, if there is still considerable excess capacity in the form of unemployed and underemployed workers, then it may be possible to increase growth by increasing demand, such as the tax cuts.
Debt is a meaningless concept in this context. Debt would only matter insofar as the flow of income in the form of interest payments on bonds create a source of demand that pull resources away from other uses. With interest payments near a post-war low as a share of GDP, this should not be a major issue for the foreseeable future.
Also, direct debt is only one way in which the government commits flows of future income. Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies are actually much more important in determining future flows of income than debt. In the case of prescription drugs alone, patent and related protections raise the price of drugs by close to $370 billion a year over the free market price, a bit less than 2.0 percent of GDP. This is considerably larger than the current interest burden of the debt, which is approximately 1.6 percent of GDP, net of money refunded from the Federal Reserve Board to the Treasury.
These monopolies are effectively like privately collected taxes. The government grants them as a way to pay for research and creative work. If anyone were really concerned about the burden created by government debt, they would factor in the cost of these monopolies to the public. The decision not to include the costs from patent and copyright monopolies in assessments of the debt makes for a fundamentally dishonest discussion of the issue.
The Washington Post misled readers in its discussion of Republican claims that its tax cuts will lead to a large boost to GDP growth. The piece quotes Kent Smetters, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying the Republican growth projections did not take account of debt. This is wrong.
The real issue is whether the projections take account of how close the U.S. economy is to its potential level of output. If the current level of demand is near the point where the economy is hitting serious supply constraints, then the Republican tax cuts will not have much impact on growth. On the other hand, if there is still considerable excess capacity in the form of unemployed and underemployed workers, then it may be possible to increase growth by increasing demand, such as the tax cuts.
Debt is a meaningless concept in this context. Debt would only matter insofar as the flow of income in the form of interest payments on bonds create a source of demand that pull resources away from other uses. With interest payments near a post-war low as a share of GDP, this should not be a major issue for the foreseeable future.
Also, direct debt is only one way in which the government commits flows of future income. Government-granted patent and copyright monopolies are actually much more important in determining future flows of income than debt. In the case of prescription drugs alone, patent and related protections raise the price of drugs by close to $370 billion a year over the free market price, a bit less than 2.0 percent of GDP. This is considerably larger than the current interest burden of the debt, which is approximately 1.6 percent of GDP, net of money refunded from the Federal Reserve Board to the Treasury.
These monopolies are effectively like privately collected taxes. The government grants them as a way to pay for research and creative work. If anyone were really concerned about the burden created by government debt, they would factor in the cost of these monopolies to the public. The decision not to include the costs from patent and copyright monopolies in assessments of the debt makes for a fundamentally dishonest discussion of the issue.
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
Read More Leer más Join the discussion Participa en la discusión
