Dean Baker
Dean Baker
Dean Bakeris an American macroeconomist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, with Mark Weisbrot. He has been a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan...
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If Medicare could negotiate directly with drug companies it could save the federal and state governments hundred of billions of dollars and cut insurance premiums.
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I think Alan and really played a unique role here. He certainly expanded the power of the Fed, in the sense that he came to be the all purpose authority on economic matters -- he was commenting on trade policy, tax policy.
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Clearly, housing is going to be a drag on the economy; the question is how much does housing slow and how quickly.
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In terms of people's lives, let's say someone had a reasonably good job in the tourism industry, they're not going to wait around a year and half or two years for their job to come back. What's there when it (the Gulf economy) comes back might be qualitatively different than what it was before.
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Home and rental prices will come back together by home prices falling. I don't think landlords will be in any position to raise rates too much.
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Home prices are going through the roof, forcing people to turn to exotic loans and unorthodox financing. These people have no room for error.
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Gore is keeping the existing system in place because it works -- using the budget surplus to add to the Social Security trust fund. So what's the point in dismantling it,
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If home prices level off, that can knock down growth by 1 or 2 percentage points, from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent.
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Does he want to see it burst on its own, or is it appropriate for the Fed to move to deflate asset bubbles?
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It's clearly very strong across the board. There's no evidence of any downturn at this point.
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Things do seem like they're out of line, but of course I've been seeing warning bells for several years.
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It's just prudent to have a chemical safety program, ... We don't want to have a sterile leaning environment, we want kids to have a rich learning environment while keeping them safe, that's the same issue every school faces.
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They can't continue to spend beyond their income indefinitely. If people are building up large amounts of debt, you reach a point where they can't continue.
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The trustees' projections continue to show that the major threat to the economic well-being of future generations is rising health-care costs.