Last year the Washington Post was anxious to highlight claims from the military industry that the military side of the sequester would have severe economic consequences especially in the DC area (e.g. here and here). Thus far it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Industry groups tend to exaggerate the general impact of policies that will hurt them directly. Unfortunately the Post apparently is not aware of this fact, at least when it comes to defense related industries.
Addendum:
The Post did run its own piece making this point last week.
Last year the Washington Post was anxious to highlight claims from the military industry that the military side of the sequester would have severe economic consequences especially in the DC area (e.g. here and here). Thus far it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Industry groups tend to exaggerate the general impact of policies that will hurt them directly. Unfortunately the Post apparently is not aware of this fact, at least when it comes to defense related industries.
Addendum:
The Post did run its own piece making this point last week.
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The NYT has a very interesting piece documenting how much more people in the United States pay for a wide variety of medical procedures and drugs. While the article provides much useful information, it badly errs in telling readers (in a quote from David Blumenthal, the President of the Commonwealth Fund) that the cost problems stem from a free market.
In fact, one of the main reasons that the United States pays so much for health care, including the items listed in this article, is precisely because it does not have a free market in large sectors of the health care industry. Of course it severely restricts the admission of immigrant doctors into the country, driving up the pay of physicians to two or three times what they would receive in other wealthy countries.
Perhaps more importantly, it grants patent monopolies to drugs and medical devices. These monopolies allow pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers of medical devices to charge prices that are many thousand percent above their free market price. Not only does this raise the cost for these items it also perversely is likely to lead to unnecessary procedures, like the proliferation of colonoscopies that are a main theme of the piece.
Because the equipment used in colonoscopies is subject to patent protection, hospitals and other medical facilities are able to charge exorbitant prices. Since colonoscopies provide large profits (which would not be the case in a free market), there is a strong incentive to push their use on patients in circumstances where they may not be needed.
This is a more general problem in U.S. medicine. Because drug companies can sell drugs for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per prescription, when they can be profitably sold for $5-$10, they have an enormous incentive to mislead the public about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs.
This is why we regularly see stories about drug companies concealing evidence that their drugs are ineffective or even harmful. That is a direct result of the enormous mark-ups that are provided by patent monopolies. If drugs were sold in a free market these incentives would not exist.
Patent monopolies are one mechanism to provide an incentive for innovation, however they are a tremendously inefficient mechanism. There are other possible routes for financing innovation (the government already spends $30 billion a year on biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health).
Of course the industry will fiercely contest any changes that threaten their profits, but no alternatives can even be considered until the public understands the nature of the problem. This piece missed a great opportunity to inform readers.
The NYT has a very interesting piece documenting how much more people in the United States pay for a wide variety of medical procedures and drugs. While the article provides much useful information, it badly errs in telling readers (in a quote from David Blumenthal, the President of the Commonwealth Fund) that the cost problems stem from a free market.
In fact, one of the main reasons that the United States pays so much for health care, including the items listed in this article, is precisely because it does not have a free market in large sectors of the health care industry. Of course it severely restricts the admission of immigrant doctors into the country, driving up the pay of physicians to two or three times what they would receive in other wealthy countries.
Perhaps more importantly, it grants patent monopolies to drugs and medical devices. These monopolies allow pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers of medical devices to charge prices that are many thousand percent above their free market price. Not only does this raise the cost for these items it also perversely is likely to lead to unnecessary procedures, like the proliferation of colonoscopies that are a main theme of the piece.
Because the equipment used in colonoscopies is subject to patent protection, hospitals and other medical facilities are able to charge exorbitant prices. Since colonoscopies provide large profits (which would not be the case in a free market), there is a strong incentive to push their use on patients in circumstances where they may not be needed.
This is a more general problem in U.S. medicine. Because drug companies can sell drugs for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per prescription, when they can be profitably sold for $5-$10, they have an enormous incentive to mislead the public about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs.
This is why we regularly see stories about drug companies concealing evidence that their drugs are ineffective or even harmful. That is a direct result of the enormous mark-ups that are provided by patent monopolies. If drugs were sold in a free market these incentives would not exist.
Patent monopolies are one mechanism to provide an incentive for innovation, however they are a tremendously inefficient mechanism. There are other possible routes for financing innovation (the government already spends $30 billion a year on biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health).
Of course the industry will fiercely contest any changes that threaten their profits, but no alternatives can even be considered until the public understands the nature of the problem. This piece missed a great opportunity to inform readers.
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The Washington Post long ago eliminated any distinction between news and opinion in its reporting on Social Security and Medicare. Keeping with this pattern, it ran a front page editorial that gave us the bad news from the Medicare and Social Security trustees reports released yesterday.
“And on Friday, analysts worried that the sunnier projections, together with an improving economy and a rapidly shrinking federal budget deficit, could serve to further dampen enthusiasm in Washington for tackling the nation’s toughest fiscal problems.”
Of course not all “analysts” were worried about the modest improvement shown in the Medicare trustees report and the modest improvement in the economy delaying action on “the nation’s toughest fiscal problems.” That was only the view of analysts whose views the Post chose to present to readers. Other analysts would have pointed out that Medicare costs are more a problem of the broken U.S. health care system (we pay more than twice as much per person for our health care than people in other wealthy countries) than a fiscal problem.
Other analysts would have also pointed out that the impact of the tax increases potentially needed to fund these programs on the living standards of most workers are swamped by the impact of the upward redistribution of income that we have been seeing over the last three decades. To obscure this fact the Post included a comment from the two public trustees, Robert Reischauer and Charles Blahous that could only have the effect of misleading the overwhelming majority of readers:
“‘Even if a Social Security solution were enacted today and effective immediately, it would require financial corrections that are substantially more severe than those enacted’ in the last major reforms to Social Security in 1983, they wrote in a message included in the report.”
It is highly unlikely that even one percent of the Post’s readers know the extent of the reforms implemented in 1983. It is possible that they do remember the tax increases and benefits cuts that were put in place in the 1980s. Most of these had already been in law, although they were moved forward by the 1983 reforms. The payroll tax for Social Security was increased by 2.24 percentage points over the course of the decade. In addition, the self-employed were required to pay the employer side of the tax as well. Since roughly 9 percent of the workforce is self-employed, this amounts to the equivalent of a 2.8 percentage point increase in the tax.
In addition, the Medicare tax was also increased by 1.9 percentage points over the course of the decade. This brings the total tax increase to 4.7 percentage points. Also, the age for collecting full benefits for Social Security was increased from 65 to 67. This increase is being phased in for people reaching age 62 in the years 2002 to 2022.
If Congress were to implement changes to the programs comparable to the ones that were actually put in place in the decade of the 1980s, it would be more than sufficient to keep them fully funded for the rest of the century according to the most recent trustees reports. If the Post had written a news story intended to inform readers it would have pointed this fact out as a clarification of the comments by Reischauer and Blahous, if it included their comments at all.
However, since this piece was written to promote the Post’s agenda of pushing cuts in these programs, it opted not to put the Reischauer-Blahous statement in a context that would have made it understandable to most readers.
The Washington Post long ago eliminated any distinction between news and opinion in its reporting on Social Security and Medicare. Keeping with this pattern, it ran a front page editorial that gave us the bad news from the Medicare and Social Security trustees reports released yesterday.
“And on Friday, analysts worried that the sunnier projections, together with an improving economy and a rapidly shrinking federal budget deficit, could serve to further dampen enthusiasm in Washington for tackling the nation’s toughest fiscal problems.”
Of course not all “analysts” were worried about the modest improvement shown in the Medicare trustees report and the modest improvement in the economy delaying action on “the nation’s toughest fiscal problems.” That was only the view of analysts whose views the Post chose to present to readers. Other analysts would have pointed out that Medicare costs are more a problem of the broken U.S. health care system (we pay more than twice as much per person for our health care than people in other wealthy countries) than a fiscal problem.
Other analysts would have also pointed out that the impact of the tax increases potentially needed to fund these programs on the living standards of most workers are swamped by the impact of the upward redistribution of income that we have been seeing over the last three decades. To obscure this fact the Post included a comment from the two public trustees, Robert Reischauer and Charles Blahous that could only have the effect of misleading the overwhelming majority of readers:
“‘Even if a Social Security solution were enacted today and effective immediately, it would require financial corrections that are substantially more severe than those enacted’ in the last major reforms to Social Security in 1983, they wrote in a message included in the report.”
It is highly unlikely that even one percent of the Post’s readers know the extent of the reforms implemented in 1983. It is possible that they do remember the tax increases and benefits cuts that were put in place in the 1980s. Most of these had already been in law, although they were moved forward by the 1983 reforms. The payroll tax for Social Security was increased by 2.24 percentage points over the course of the decade. In addition, the self-employed were required to pay the employer side of the tax as well. Since roughly 9 percent of the workforce is self-employed, this amounts to the equivalent of a 2.8 percentage point increase in the tax.
In addition, the Medicare tax was also increased by 1.9 percentage points over the course of the decade. This brings the total tax increase to 4.7 percentage points. Also, the age for collecting full benefits for Social Security was increased from 65 to 67. This increase is being phased in for people reaching age 62 in the years 2002 to 2022.
If Congress were to implement changes to the programs comparable to the ones that were actually put in place in the decade of the 1980s, it would be more than sufficient to keep them fully funded for the rest of the century according to the most recent trustees reports. If the Post had written a news story intended to inform readers it would have pointed this fact out as a clarification of the comments by Reischauer and Blahous, if it included their comments at all.
However, since this piece was written to promote the Post’s agenda of pushing cuts in these programs, it opted not to put the Reischauer-Blahous statement in a context that would have made it understandable to most readers.
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At least he does on many key economic issues. In his blogpost today he comes out explicitly for breaking up the big banks, for an immigration policy that is focused on bringing down the wages of high-end wage earners (I’m going to put words in his mouth and assume that he means doctors and lawyers and not lower paid STEM workers), and for reducing protections like copyright (I’ll read in patents also) that benefit special interests.
He also commits himself to a monetary policy that is considerably more expansionary that what the Fed has been pursuing. Whether it would have done the trick in bringing the economy back to full employment is an open question, but for those of us who care about poor people, the difference between an economy with 4-5 percent unemployment and the current economy will swamp anything we can hope to accomplish with food stamps, TANF, or any other politically plausible government programs.
Anyhow, I don’t know how many troops Douthat has, but if there are many conservatives who actually want to beat up big banks, drug companies, doctors and other professionals who get rich through protectionism, and to seriously push for full employment policies (maybe Douthat would go for a lower-valued dollar), then on economic issues progressives might have more allies among conservatives than in the Obama administration.
At least he does on many key economic issues. In his blogpost today he comes out explicitly for breaking up the big banks, for an immigration policy that is focused on bringing down the wages of high-end wage earners (I’m going to put words in his mouth and assume that he means doctors and lawyers and not lower paid STEM workers), and for reducing protections like copyright (I’ll read in patents also) that benefit special interests.
He also commits himself to a monetary policy that is considerably more expansionary that what the Fed has been pursuing. Whether it would have done the trick in bringing the economy back to full employment is an open question, but for those of us who care about poor people, the difference between an economy with 4-5 percent unemployment and the current economy will swamp anything we can hope to accomplish with food stamps, TANF, or any other politically plausible government programs.
Anyhow, I don’t know how many troops Douthat has, but if there are many conservatives who actually want to beat up big banks, drug companies, doctors and other professionals who get rich through protectionism, and to seriously push for full employment policies (maybe Douthat would go for a lower-valued dollar), then on economic issues progressives might have more allies among conservatives than in the Obama administration.
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NPR had a useful piece on the limited retreat from austerity in the euro zone now that the policy has been shown to be a failure. However the piece likely left readers with the impression that there were/are no alternatives to austerity.
This is of course not true. The European Central Bank could have supported an aggressive policy of fiscal stimulus led by Germany and other countries with trade surpluses. This would have boosted the economies of the euro zone as a whole.
It is arguably true that such a policy was not possible for political reasons. Germans have an aversion to inflation which they regard as the root of all evil. They refuse to consider the possibility of a higher inflation rate as a way to boost growth and re-balance the euro zone in the same way that creationists in the United States will refuse to allow evidence for evolution to change their views on human origins.
This irrational approach to economics by Germany, by far the most important country in the euro, many in reality limit the political options. However this piece should have made that fact clear to listeners rather than leaving many with the impression that there is some economic reason that the people of the euro zone countries need to suffer through years of high unemployment.
NPR had a useful piece on the limited retreat from austerity in the euro zone now that the policy has been shown to be a failure. However the piece likely left readers with the impression that there were/are no alternatives to austerity.
This is of course not true. The European Central Bank could have supported an aggressive policy of fiscal stimulus led by Germany and other countries with trade surpluses. This would have boosted the economies of the euro zone as a whole.
It is arguably true that such a policy was not possible for political reasons. Germans have an aversion to inflation which they regard as the root of all evil. They refuse to consider the possibility of a higher inflation rate as a way to boost growth and re-balance the euro zone in the same way that creationists in the United States will refuse to allow evidence for evolution to change their views on human origins.
This irrational approach to economics by Germany, by far the most important country in the euro, many in reality limit the political options. However this piece should have made that fact clear to listeners rather than leaving many with the impression that there is some economic reason that the people of the euro zone countries need to suffer through years of high unemployment.
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Thomas Edsall devoted his blogpost yesterday to a paper by Daron Acemoglu claiming that the United States can’t follow a path like Sweden and have “cuddly capitalism.” By this Acemoglu is referring to a welfare state that protects most people from the risks in a market economy.
However what Edsall, following Acemoglu, overlooks in his discussion is that the United States already has cuddly capitalism. The difference between the United States and Sweden is who gets cuddled. While Sweden’s welfare state is designed to provide protections to ordinary people, in the United States it is those on the top who can count on the state’s help.
For example, if you are an incompetent bank executive at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup whose reckless lending threatens to sink your bank, you can count on the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board to provide trillions of dollars in below market loans to support your bank through the rough times. If you are a drug or medical supply company you can count on the government to grant you patent monopolies so that no one can compete with you in the market for long periods of time. Highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers can count on a trade policy that is designed to depress the wages of most people who provide you services, while protecting you from the effects of foreign competition.
There are a long list of ways in which the U.S. government gets very cuddly with those at the top as noted in my classic The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. Of course those at the top would prefer that the only government interventions that are put up for debate are the ones that help more ordinary people, they would rather keep the interventions that benefit the wealthy out of the discussion. Unfortunately both Acemoglu and Edsall follow this path.
Thomas Edsall devoted his blogpost yesterday to a paper by Daron Acemoglu claiming that the United States can’t follow a path like Sweden and have “cuddly capitalism.” By this Acemoglu is referring to a welfare state that protects most people from the risks in a market economy.
However what Edsall, following Acemoglu, overlooks in his discussion is that the United States already has cuddly capitalism. The difference between the United States and Sweden is who gets cuddled. While Sweden’s welfare state is designed to provide protections to ordinary people, in the United States it is those on the top who can count on the state’s help.
For example, if you are an incompetent bank executive at Goldman Sachs or Citigroup whose reckless lending threatens to sink your bank, you can count on the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board to provide trillions of dollars in below market loans to support your bank through the rough times. If you are a drug or medical supply company you can count on the government to grant you patent monopolies so that no one can compete with you in the market for long periods of time. Highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers can count on a trade policy that is designed to depress the wages of most people who provide you services, while protecting you from the effects of foreign competition.
There are a long list of ways in which the U.S. government gets very cuddly with those at the top as noted in my classic The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive. Of course those at the top would prefer that the only government interventions that are put up for debate are the ones that help more ordinary people, they would rather keep the interventions that benefit the wealthy out of the discussion. Unfortunately both Acemoglu and Edsall follow this path.
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The wealthy countries of the world have spent the last three and half years falling off a 90 percent debt-to-GDP growth cliff that we should now all be able to agree does not exist. While I am happy to see that economists have been able to demonstrate conclusively that the world is not flat, I will just quickly explain again why I always knew this fact.
As I have explained numerous times, in addition to debt, governments also have assets. In fact, governments routinely sell assets, not just out of ideological or corruption driven privatization drives, but in the normal course of events they will have occasion to sell off items like land, unneeded office space, portions of the broadcast spectrum, etc.
If there were some serious growth penalty associated with certain debt levels then it would imply that selling off assets would give an above market return. Not only would the government get the market price for whatever asset it was selling, but it would also lead to a growth premium as a result of pushing its debt lower. In the case of the Reinhart-Rogoff cliff story, this premium would be enormous since we could envision raising growth by a full percentage point by selling enough assets to lower our debt-to-GDP ratio from 95 percent to 85 percent (roughly $1.6 trillion in assets).
We don’t typically see governments selling assets for this reason. This would suggest that either governments were very dumb for not taking advantage of an easy way to boost growth or that debt does not have the negative impact on growth that was advertised.
While there are plenty of politicians who are to lunch when it comes to economic policy, this struck me as too out to lunch to be believed. For this reason, I could never be a believer in the Reinhart-Rogoff debt cliff even before other economists were able to show that the relationship did not exist.
The wealthy countries of the world have spent the last three and half years falling off a 90 percent debt-to-GDP growth cliff that we should now all be able to agree does not exist. While I am happy to see that economists have been able to demonstrate conclusively that the world is not flat, I will just quickly explain again why I always knew this fact.
As I have explained numerous times, in addition to debt, governments also have assets. In fact, governments routinely sell assets, not just out of ideological or corruption driven privatization drives, but in the normal course of events they will have occasion to sell off items like land, unneeded office space, portions of the broadcast spectrum, etc.
If there were some serious growth penalty associated with certain debt levels then it would imply that selling off assets would give an above market return. Not only would the government get the market price for whatever asset it was selling, but it would also lead to a growth premium as a result of pushing its debt lower. In the case of the Reinhart-Rogoff cliff story, this premium would be enormous since we could envision raising growth by a full percentage point by selling enough assets to lower our debt-to-GDP ratio from 95 percent to 85 percent (roughly $1.6 trillion in assets).
We don’t typically see governments selling assets for this reason. This would suggest that either governments were very dumb for not taking advantage of an easy way to boost growth or that debt does not have the negative impact on growth that was advertised.
While there are plenty of politicians who are to lunch when it comes to economic policy, this struck me as too out to lunch to be believed. For this reason, I could never be a believer in the Reinhart-Rogoff debt cliff even before other economists were able to show that the relationship did not exist.
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Ok folks, this one is a little nerdy, but there are some important issues here. In the last year or so the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ measure of national income growth has exceeded its measure of GDP growth. This has led some analysts to jump on the income numbers and say that the economy is actually growing somewhat more rapidly than the GDP measures that were routinely follow, which are measured on the output side.
Just to backtrack for a moment, in principle we should be able to measure GDP on either the income side or the output side and come up with the same number. The income side means that we add up all the incomes generated in production: wages, interest, profits, rents, etc. On the output side we would be measuring the value of all the goods and services produced over the course of a quarter or year. If we had perfect measurements of the economy then the two should end up being the same.
As a practical matter they never are the same. Most often the output side is somewhat higher (@ 0.5 percent) than the income side. The conventional wisdom is that income is more poorly measured because people have a reason to lie about their income (i.e. taxes). So economists have traditionally looked at the output side as the better measure of growth.
While the output side has historically shown a somewhat higher measure of GDP, there have been some exceptions to this, most notably in the late 1990s and the peak of the last business cycle. These were both periods in which there were large amounts of capital gains generated by bubbles in the stock market in the 1990s and housing market in the last decade.
While capital gains are not supposed to count as income for GDP purposes, it is almost certain that some do. (Short-term capital gains are taxed the same way as normal income, so there is no reason for people to distinguish between capital gains and normal income on tax forms.) Anyhow, if we hypothesize that some amount of capital gains end up being counted as normal income then any time we have more capital gains in the economy we would expect that the income side measure of GDP would rise relative to the output side measure.
David Rosnick and I tested this view a couple years back, measuring the extent to which the statistical discrepancy (the gap between the output measurement and income measurement of GDP) fluctuated in response to recent trends in capital gains. And, we got a very solid fit. So we were not surprised when the recent run-up in the stock market, coupled with a recovery in the housing market, caused income growth to again exceed output growth. But hey, there can be lots of good jobs struggling over this one.
Anyhow, this matters both for the answer to the question as to how fast the economy is growing, but also how we view savings. Savings are defined as the difference between income and consumption. If capital gains are showing up as income, then we are overstating income and therefore overstating savings. We think this was very likely the case at the peaks of both the stock and housing bubbles, which means that the consumption driven by these bubbles was even larger than the conventional data show.
Note: Typos corrected — thanks Joe and Medgeek.
Ok folks, this one is a little nerdy, but there are some important issues here. In the last year or so the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ measure of national income growth has exceeded its measure of GDP growth. This has led some analysts to jump on the income numbers and say that the economy is actually growing somewhat more rapidly than the GDP measures that were routinely follow, which are measured on the output side.
Just to backtrack for a moment, in principle we should be able to measure GDP on either the income side or the output side and come up with the same number. The income side means that we add up all the incomes generated in production: wages, interest, profits, rents, etc. On the output side we would be measuring the value of all the goods and services produced over the course of a quarter or year. If we had perfect measurements of the economy then the two should end up being the same.
As a practical matter they never are the same. Most often the output side is somewhat higher (@ 0.5 percent) than the income side. The conventional wisdom is that income is more poorly measured because people have a reason to lie about their income (i.e. taxes). So economists have traditionally looked at the output side as the better measure of growth.
While the output side has historically shown a somewhat higher measure of GDP, there have been some exceptions to this, most notably in the late 1990s and the peak of the last business cycle. These were both periods in which there were large amounts of capital gains generated by bubbles in the stock market in the 1990s and housing market in the last decade.
While capital gains are not supposed to count as income for GDP purposes, it is almost certain that some do. (Short-term capital gains are taxed the same way as normal income, so there is no reason for people to distinguish between capital gains and normal income on tax forms.) Anyhow, if we hypothesize that some amount of capital gains end up being counted as normal income then any time we have more capital gains in the economy we would expect that the income side measure of GDP would rise relative to the output side measure.
David Rosnick and I tested this view a couple years back, measuring the extent to which the statistical discrepancy (the gap between the output measurement and income measurement of GDP) fluctuated in response to recent trends in capital gains. And, we got a very solid fit. So we were not surprised when the recent run-up in the stock market, coupled with a recovery in the housing market, caused income growth to again exceed output growth. But hey, there can be lots of good jobs struggling over this one.
Anyhow, this matters both for the answer to the question as to how fast the economy is growing, but also how we view savings. Savings are defined as the difference between income and consumption. If capital gains are showing up as income, then we are overstating income and therefore overstating savings. We think this was very likely the case at the peaks of both the stock and housing bubbles, which means that the consumption driven by these bubbles was even larger than the conventional data show.
Note: Typos corrected — thanks Joe and Medgeek.
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Paul Krugman commented on the dubious claim that Ireland’s economy is recovering. He noted that its GDP is still well below its pre-crisis level. While this is true, the employment to population (EPOP) ratio might give a better sense of how most people in Ireland might view the situation.
Source: OECD.
Through the end of last year Ireland had actually seen a slightly sharper fall in its EPOP than Greece and Spain, the two countries hardest hit by the troika’s austerity agenda. Ireland’s EPOP had stabilized by 2011 while the EPOPs in Greece and Spain were headed sharply lower, but it is hard to see much of a recovery story here. At the end of 2012 the EPOP in Ireland was still down more than 10 percentage points from its pre-recession level. That doesn’t look like much of a success story.
Paul Krugman commented on the dubious claim that Ireland’s economy is recovering. He noted that its GDP is still well below its pre-crisis level. While this is true, the employment to population (EPOP) ratio might give a better sense of how most people in Ireland might view the situation.
Source: OECD.
Through the end of last year Ireland had actually seen a slightly sharper fall in its EPOP than Greece and Spain, the two countries hardest hit by the troika’s austerity agenda. Ireland’s EPOP had stabilized by 2011 while the EPOPs in Greece and Spain were headed sharply lower, but it is hard to see much of a recovery story here. At the end of 2012 the EPOP in Ireland was still down more than 10 percentage points from its pre-recession level. That doesn’t look like much of a success story.
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The media have largely accepted at face value the claims from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that is necessary to close a large number of the city’s schools in order to save money and improve the quality of education. It turns out that much of what Emanuel has claimed about savings and moving students to better schools is not supported by the evidence as Chicago radio station WBEZ uncovered in its analysis.
One might think that this sort of follow-up would get more attention from the national media not only because Rahm Emanuel was formerly President Obama’s chief of staff, but also because its school commissioner for 8 years was Arne Duncan, the current education secretary. Emanuel’s claims that the schools are a disaster would seem to be an indictment of Mr. Duncan’s performance. (Several of the schools slated for closing were success stories highlighted by Duncan.)
The Post deserves credit on this one. Its education reporter Valerie Strauss did her homework.
The media have largely accepted at face value the claims from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that is necessary to close a large number of the city’s schools in order to save money and improve the quality of education. It turns out that much of what Emanuel has claimed about savings and moving students to better schools is not supported by the evidence as Chicago radio station WBEZ uncovered in its analysis.
One might think that this sort of follow-up would get more attention from the national media not only because Rahm Emanuel was formerly President Obama’s chief of staff, but also because its school commissioner for 8 years was Arne Duncan, the current education secretary. Emanuel’s claims that the schools are a disaster would seem to be an indictment of Mr. Duncan’s performance. (Several of the schools slated for closing were success stories highlighted by Duncan.)
The Post deserves credit on this one. Its education reporter Valerie Strauss did her homework.
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