Dean Baker Quotes (28 Quotes)

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.

The biggest surprise to me has been that interest rates have stayed as low as they have as long as they have.

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.

The idea that we have to make cuts imminently because of the Baby Boomer generation is simply not true, ... We knew about Boomers and adjusted the program accordingly. Greenspan is really off the mark.

As you get higher interest rates renting is going to look better than buying.

With the housing bubble now having generated comparable levels of unsustainable wealth, the economy faces even greater dangers today than it did when the stock market crashed.

I've always thought you'll have the movement in price before you'll see it on quantity side, ... As long as the price remains high, if you're a builder, you want to get the houses up in order to cash in.

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.

WE WERE shocking today and were given a lesson in finishing as they had nine chances and took six of them.

the collapse of the housing bubble, implying a drop of between 11 and 22 percent in the average of housing prices, that will destroy between 1.3 trillion and 2.6 trillion in housing wealth.

Congress deliberately designed the bill in a way that would ensure that private insurance companies would provide the benefit instead of the Medicare administration or a single designated provider. This design both substantially increased the cost of drugs and administrative costs in addition to making the drug program much more complicated for beneficiaries.

If home prices level off, that can knock down growth by 1 or 2 percentage points, from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent.

Things do seem like they're out of line, but of course I've been seeing warning bells for several years.

In principle, as long as drug companies can cover their production costs and earn a normal profit on their sales, they would profit by selling their drugs to Medicare rather than being excluded from this huge market.

Hawaii's home prices suffered in the 1990s because of economic trouble in Japan, ... If home prices in California reverse, it will have ripple effects.

is kind of (the oil companies') good luck. They didn't do anything to earn it. And we're sitting here with a 150 billion bill from Katrina.

First of all, it's very expensive to administer private accounts, especially if you let people manage these accounts themselves, ... Bush is vague on how he would set it up and make it work.

We would really like people to log on to the site, check it out and give us some feedback.

On this policy, the district is already in compliance with the requirements and has been for a couple of years, ... This policy just formalizes it.

Consumer prices are likely to catch up eventually, say economists. I'm not a big inflation hawk, ... but consumers are almost certainly going to be paying more.

I think their intention is to get people who are loyal and that does raise problems. It's clear that they're looking at this as a sales position.

He was the one who had the courage to let the unemployment rate fall. Very few people thought the unemployment rate could fall that low.

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,

Until the psychology starts to shift or interest rates jump up, the market will probably stay strong, ... So far we haven't seen that. We've had a lot of stories on housing bubbles lately. Maybe that will affect the psychology.

We've backed ourselves into a very dangerous situation. The economy is dependent on everyone consuming like crazy. If everyone heard my diatribe and said, 'Yeah, we better start saving,' the economy would go into a recession.

These monthly numbers are very erratic. It can be that this is a sign (of the bubble bursting), but I would never make too much of one month's number. Especially since the other timely data we get, the mortgage applications for home purchases, have still been pretty high.

People talk about Nixon going to China -- you had this hard-line anti communist helping build up relationships with China, I would say it was like that only 5 times as much.

The trustees' projections continue to show that the major threat to the economic well-being of future generations is rising health-care costs.