Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, April 27, 2015

Dean Baker
Truthout, April 27, 2015

April 2015, Cherrie Bucknor

Mark WeisbrotCrash Magazine, 24 ????????, 2015

Vikram Gandhi, VICE on HBO correspondent travelled to Haiti to see just what happened with the $10 billion in aid pledged after the earthquake that occurred more than five years ago. The episode aired at 11 PM EST 4/24/15.

In a sneak peek, Gandhi goes to the site of a housing expo held in 2011. Organized by the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission led by Bill Clinton, the expo was meant to showcase model homes that could be built across the country. With more than a million made homeless, and hundreds of thousands of homes damaged or destroyed, providing new housing was seen as key to “building back better.”

Greg Mankiw joined the parade of prominent people saying silly things to help push fast-track trade authority through Congress. He headlined a column:

"Economists actually agree on this point: The Wisdom of Free Trade." 

The piece then goes on to argue for fast-track trade authority to allow for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP).

It's nice that Mankiw has apparently gotten out his bag of economist's holy water and blessed them both as free trade agreements, but that doesn't make it true. (Hey, I want to have the Congress Gives $1 Trillion to Dean Baker Free Trade Act. As an economist in good standing, Mankiw will have to support this free trade measure.)

The basic story here is a very simple one. There are merits to reducing trade barriers, but traditional trade deals will have winners and losers. If this is hard to understand, imagine that we had a free trade deal in physicians' services so that a flood of foreign doctors cut the pay of doctors by 50 percent (@$125,000 a year on average). This would make most of us winners, since we will pay less for health care, but doctors would be big losers. Most traditional trade deals have this character. So people, including economist people, may reasonably oppose them if they think the losers will be hurt so much that it offsets the gains from the deal. (Yes, we can do redistribution, but that is a children's story. We don't.)

But the key point here is that neither the TPP or TTIP is a traditional trade deal. The formal trade barriers between the parties to these deals are already low, which means there is not much room to lower them further. These deals are mostly about putting in place a business friendly structure of regulation. Some of this business friendly regulation involves increasing barriers in the form of stronger and longer patent and copyright protection. (Yes, that is "protection," as in protectionism.)

Dean Baker
The Guardian, April 22, 2015

April 2015, Ravi Katari and Dean Baker

Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera America, April 22, 2015

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, gave four Pinocchios this morning to Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown for for mis-attributing a claim on lost jobs from the trade deficit to George W. Bush. Since I may have played a role in the Pinocchio warranting comments, let me try to clear up some possible confusion on the issue.

At the most basic level there are two different ways to view trade based on two different views of the overall economy. The conventional view is that trade affects the allocation of output (i.e. we produce more of some goods and services and less of others) but has little impact on the overall level of output. This is because the economy is assumed to be at or near full employment. The other view is that trade can have a large impact on employment and output because the economy is often not near full employment. In this case, the size of the trade deficit can make a big difference.