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Article Artículo

Latin America and the Caribbean

Cold Warrior Criticizes Cold War and Drug War, Hires Cold Warrior to Promote Drug War

After penning an op-ed which blames the U.S. backed cold war and drug war for leading to the recent surge in migration from Central America, the Guatemalan President has hired a cold warrior to lobby the U.S. for increasing drug war cooperation. Confused yet? Okay, let’s start over.

Last week, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina wrote an op-ed in the Guardian arguing that the U.S. shared responsibility for a legacy that has spurred the current migration crisis involving the surge of unaccompanied Central American children arriving at U.S. borders:

…the so-called cold war had one of its hot spots in Guatemala…Communist and anti-communist ideologies created in Guatemala one of the bloodiest conflicts in Latin America, with weapons and money mostly from countries outside the region. More damaging was that for decades governments diverted resources from social and economic programs to security and defense.

…

Nonetheless, after the curse of the cold war, we faced another war: the war on drugs. Again based on ideological motivations, this new war diverted scarce funding from policies to foster education, health and employment to programs to block the flow of drugs from producer countries in South America to the consumer countries in the north. The failure of the war on drugs is widely recognized today, both for its limited capacity to stop drug flow, and its terrible consequences, expanding violence, corrupting institutions and weakening the rule of law.

While Perez Molina makes some fine points in his op-ed, he also completely leaves out his own role in the exact policies he’s criticizing. During the Cold War, Molina was a Guatemalan military officer involved in a “scorched earth” campaign that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and he has even been personally linked to serious human rights violations from this time period. Pot, meet kettle.

The situation took a turn for the ironic this week when O’Dwyers reported that Guatemala had hired notorious and far-right cold-warrior Otto Reich to lobby on the government’s behalf in Washington. Reich, who’s also been pretty much at the center of every lousy U.S. policy in the region since the Cold War, will be paid over $100,000 to, among other things:

Design a strategy to move forward on the change of narrative from Guatemala to Washington, D.C., allowing representatives in the North American political parties that are willing to abandon the reference to Guatemala of the 1970’s and 1980’s, as well as the last century, and are eager to talk about the present and future of Guatemala of the 21st century.

Jake Johnston and Peter Hayakawa / August 12, 2014

Article Artículo

Robert Samuelson Says Economics Is An Inexact Science, Except When He Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare

Regular readers of the Washington Post have grown fond of Robert Samuelson's repeated calls for cuts to Social Security (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here , and here). At the core of Samuelson's complaints are long-term projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and other sources, that the country will have large deficits 15 years, 25 years, or further in the future.

He likes to say that these deficits are due to Social Security and Medicare, although the main driver is the fact that U.S. health care costs are vastly out of line with costs in the rest of the world. If our doctors, drug companies, and other health care providers got paid the same as their counterparts in other wealthy countries, the projections would show huge surpluses, not deficits. But Samuelson prefers to go after poor and middle class seniors rather than highly paid people in the health care sector.

But this is secondary to the big issue with today's column. Samuelson's repeated hyperventilations about Social Security and Medicare are based on budget projections made for the distant and very distant future. For this purpose Samuelson apparently is willing to accept that economics can be a very precise science even though the past track record of budget forecasters has been atrocious. (For cheap thrills check out these projections for large deficits in the year 2000, big surpluses in 2003, or modest deficits in 2010. In each case the overwhelming source of error was in the economic projection, not policy changes.)

But for today's column arguing that the Fed should be looking to raise interest rates sooner rather than later Samuelson has serious reservations about the quality of economic predictions:

"Although economists are arguing furiously over this [whether the Fed should be raising interest rates], there’s no scientific way to measure slack. Economic policymaking is often an exercise in educated guesswork, built on imperfect statistics, shaky assumptions, incomplete theories and political preferences. This is an instructive case in point."

He concludes the piece:

"The Fed is expected to begin raising rates in 2015, but the time and pace are unknown. The danger of waiting too long or going too slow is that inflation, now controlled in the market and in Americans’ thinking, will escape these convenient bounds. Once that happens — as the double-digit inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s showed — inflation takes on a life of its own and becomes self-fulfilling. It can be suppressed only through tight credit, recession and high unemployment. We don’t want to go there."

Dean Baker / August 11, 2014

Article Artículo

Health and Social Programs

What's 35 Grand to Marco Rubio? Apparently Not Much

Writing in the National Review recently, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida claims that Social Security will be insolvent by the time he retires. He goes on to make a few suggestions to fix the program. Each of these ‘fixes’ is problematic. The flaws with the Rubio fixes have been and will be repeated many times (for example, raising the retirement age can be problematic for workers in physically demanding jobs). But before getting to the fixes, there should be a full stop after the paragraph:

CEPR / August 07, 2014

Article Artículo

Argentina

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Wall Street Journal Uses Bogus Numbers to Smear Argentine President

Last week the Wall Street Journal had a front page article on the net worth of Argentina’s first family since 2003, the year Néstor Kirchner was elected president. Based on financial disclosures with Argentina’s Anti-Corruption Office, the Wall Street Journal reported that, “the couple's net worth rose from $2.5 million to $17.7 million” between 2003 and 2010. Implying that such returns must involve some sort of corruption, the Journal writes, a “lot of people in Argentina want to know where that money came from.”

But there is a serious problem with the way the data are presented here. The Journal is reporting the Kirchners’ net worth in dollars, without adjusting for local inflation. This makes the increase look much bigger than it is, since Argentina had cumulative inflation of nearly 200 percent during these years, according to private estimates.

WSJ Kirchner wealth

If the Wall Street Journal had taken inflation into account then the Kirchner’s net worth would have looked quite different. From $2.5 million in 2003, the Kirchners’ real net worth increased to around $6.1 million in 2010.

Simply adjusting for inflation takes away more than three-quarters of the Kirchners’ gain. Should the Journal have known this and adjusted for inflation? The question answers itself. We won’t speculate about anyone’s motives.

Jake Johnston and Mark Weisbrot / August 06, 2014