En español I have rarely responded to trolls because ? well, what’s the point? It’s not like they care about facts or logic.For example, Francisco Toro, a blogger who fulminates about Venezuela and appears in the Washington Post, has been trolling me for

NPR reports that the “Trump administration is considering penalizing legal immigrants for using government benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps…” NPR’s story is very good, but it also minimizes the radical scope of the Trump “public charge” proposal,

About two decades ago, when my colleagues at the Economic Policy Institute were first beginning to make serious inroads in getting the media to accept that growing inequality was a problem, there were several studies that argued we shouldn't be concerned because we had high rates of mobility. The argument was that even if a snapshot showed there was a bigger gap between the top and everyone else, this wasn't a big deal because we saw people constantly changing places in the income hierarchy. People who were in the bottom income in one decade could be in the top or fourth quintile a decade later, with those at the top often sliding down one or two quintiles.

It turned out that this result was driven by the inclusion of students in the analysis. Guess what? Many medical students and business students don't have very high incomes when they are in school, but ten years later they may be in the top quintile of income earners. Aren't you glad that we have highly skilled economists (and highly paid) to discover facts like this?

Of course, when you do the analysis seriously and just take people in their prime earning years (above age 25) there was very little mobility. People may move up or down a quintile, but very few from the bottom quintile ended up in the top or even fourth quintile.

Robert Samuelson seems to pull the same sort of trick as the mobility studied in presenting new research from Pew. Samuelson tells us that we might be "richer than we think."  He tells us of a seeming paradox.

In 2015, CEPR modeled what would happen to unemployment rates for black workers if unemployment fell further. The model found that, if overall unemployment and unemployment for whites specifically, declined more, black workers would disproportionately ben

Dean Baker
Truthout, August 20, 2018

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, August 19, 2018

With its authority recently upheld by the courts, Puerto Rico’s Federal Management and Oversight Board (known simply as “the Board”) continues to impose harsh austerity measures on the people of Puerto Rico. But while residents face pension cuts, school c

Ted Boettner and Dean Baker
Charleston Gazette-Mail, August 16, 2018

Dean Baker
Challenge, August 15, 2018