Those who hoped that Jeff Bezos takeover of the Washington Post would lead to a quick improvement in the quality of its budget reporting will be seriously disappointed by the paper's lead story today. The story bemoaned the fact that, "after six budget showdowns, big government is mostly unchanged" [the article's headline].

The article uses four metrics to measure the size of government, none of which would inform readers of anything. Its lead metric is spending in nominal dollars, which it tells us will be $3.455 trillion in fiscal 2013. It tells us that this is down by only a small amount from a "whopping $3.457 trillion" spent in 2010.

Incredibly, the article does not even adjust this spending amount for inflation. (The piece does briefly note later that this is a 5 percent decline adjusted for inflation.) Of course a serious analysis would have expressed spending as a share of GDP, which shows that spending dropped from 24.1 percent of GDP in 2010 to 21.5 percent of GDP in 2013. This decline in spending of 2.6 percentage points of GDP would be the equivalent of roughly $420 billion in today's economy.

Assuming a multiplier of 1.5, this reduction in spending has cost the economy more than $600 billion in annual output since there is no plausible story by which cuts in government spending lead to addition private sector demand in the current economic situation. (To be fair, there is a lot of vigorous handwaving on this topic by proponents of spending cuts.) That would translate into more than 5 million fewer jobs.

The piece goes on to tell us that Bezos' paper does not like government spending in general and in particular dislikes Social Security and Medicare. In terms of government spending the piece tells readers:

Dean Baker
Caixin Online, August 23, 2013

As we have previously described, members of Congress have called for suspension of U.S. aid to Honduras’ police and military over allegations – and evidence – of human rights abuses, including forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings. The U.S. State Department response has been one of deception and circumvention, with officials saying U.S. assistance to the Honduran police does not go to National Police Director Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla – at the same time that Honduran officials point out that Bonilla is of course in charge of all Honduran police officers.

It appears though that the State Department has no problem in halting support to rights-abusing police forces elsewhere when it wants. Reuters reported yesterday:

The United States has suspended assistance to the police department of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia as a result of allegations of serious human rights violations, the State Department confirmed on Thursday.

…

The allegations stem from 12 killings committed between 2010 and 2011, some of which were committed by an "ad hoc task force within the police department," a U.S. State Department Human Rights Report said.

The alleged extra-judicial killings stemmed from the circulation of a hit list targeting persons deemed to be criminals. Five suspects whose names were on that list were shot and killed during police operations.

The following labor market policy research reports were recently released: 

Center for American Progress

American Retirement Savings Could Be Much Better
Rowland Davis and David Madland

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

SNAP Enrollment Remains High Because Job Market Remains Weak
Chad Stone, Jared Bernstein, Arloc Sherman and Dottie Rosenbaum

Economic Policy Institute

A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class
Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz

The Unfinished March: An Overview
Algernon Austin

Dean Baker
Project Syndicate, August 19, 2013

Mark WeisbrotThe Guardian Unlimited, 20 de agosto, 2013En Inglés

Yesterday the Associated Press fielded its entry in the classics in bad reporting on economic policy contest: a profile it did of David Walker, the former head of the Government Accountability Office and also former president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The piece presented everything that Walker said at face value, making no effort to put his scare story in any context nor to verify his assertions.

The AP entry starts out strong with the third paragraph telling readers:

"Next month, he will present a major report for the nonprofit he founded, the Comeback America Initiative, whose purpose is to raise awareness about the federal government’s swelling debt. It’s a chasm that isn’t top of mind for most Americans, he knows. But Walker, 61, wants it to be."

Note the use of "swelling" instead of a more neutral term or maybe no adjective at all. Then we get the term "chasm" as opposed to a term like "issue."

Then we are told that Walker passes around fake trillion bills because, quoting Walker:

“Washington spends a trillion dollars like it’s nothing.”

Is that true? I recall big debates in the last few weeks over spending $40 billion on food stamps over the next decade. We've had big debates over the $250 million (1/4,000th of a trillion) [number corrected] spent each year on public broadcasting. In fact, John McCain made a big issue in his 2008 presidential campaign over spending $1 million (one millionth of a trillion) on a Woodstock museum. There seem to be lots of very big debates in Washington on spending sums that are way smaller than $1 trillion.

Human rights defenders in Haiti are reporting new death threats, and seem to be openly persecuted by powerful individuals and groups, as Mark Snyder and Other Worlds describe today. In an article posted on Huffington Post, Snyder profiles the case of atto