July 25, 2021

25 Julio 2021

The piece implies that Republicans in Congress would be happy to go along with increased funding for tax enforcement if it were done by someone other than the IRS. There is absolutely zero reason to believe this is true.

• Economic Crisis and RecoveryCrisis económica y recuperación

Inflation as People Experience It and as Economists Measure It

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 22, 2021

22 Julio 2021

We all know that economic measures cannot fully capture the state of people’s well-being. A big part of that picture is the inadequacy of the CPI as a measure of the cost of living in any real sense.

• Intellectual PropertyPropiedad Intelectual

Patent Monopolies, Corruption, and the New Alzheimer’s Drug

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 20, 2021

20 Julio 2021

It would be nice if we could one day have a serious discussion of alternative mechanisms for financing research instead of acting as though the patent system came down to us from god.

• COVID-19CoronavirusIntellectual PropertyPropiedad Intelectual

The Drug Companies Are Killing People

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 18, 2021

18 Julio 2021

They are using their government-granted patent monopolies, and their control over technical information about the production of vaccines, to limit the supply of vaccines available to the world.

• InequalityLa Desigualdad

Can We Cut the Crap on “Unconstrained Globalized Capitalism”?

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 18, 2021

18 Julio 2021

I get why the right likes to make it seem that the huge upward redistribution of the last four decades was just the result of the market working its magic, but why do so many liberals feel the need to play along?

• GovernmentEl GobiernoInequalityLa Desigualdad

Washington Post Has Another Pulitzer Prize Contender in Mind Reading Category, Tells Us Why Republican Senators Don’t Want to Increase I.R.S. Enforcement

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 18, 2021

18 Julio 2021

Thankfully we have the Washington Post to tell us that the Republican effort to block a crackdown on rich tax cheats had nothing to do with serving their campaign contributors.

• EnvironmentUnionsSindicato

0.16 Percent of All Workers are Union Members Employed by Utilities

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 16, 2021

16 Julio 2021

The impact of this pace of job loss in the utility sector would be dwarfed by other factors, like government-granted patent and copyright monopolies or the overall unemployment rate, in determining the extent of inequality in the country.

• Economic Crisis and RecoveryCrisis económica y recuperación

New York Times Goes to Looney Tunes Land On the Fed

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 12, 2021

12 Julio 2021

This is bizarre, because people who read the news section of the NYT would know that workers have more bargaining power in the economy right now than at any point since at least the late 1990s.

• Economic Crisis and RecoveryCrisis económica y recuperación

News for Washington Post: People Don’t See Economic Growth, they Read About it in the News

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 12, 2021

12 Julio 2021

If the economy is in fact growing slowly in 2023, as currently projected, people will only be aware of this fact because news outlets and politicians choose to highlight it.

• Economic Crisis and RecoveryCrisis económica y recuperación

Invented Inflation: A Big Part of the Real Inflation of the 1970s

By Dean BakerDean Baker

July 09, 2021

09 Julio 2021

In the 1970s, actually in the late 1960s also, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had an error in its construction that led it to overstate the rate of inflation relative to the current measure.