Dean Baker

Ben Bernanke's column in the Washington Post has to be absolutely infuriating to anyone old enough to remember the events of 2008. In this column, Bernanke lectures the public about the need for the Federal Reserve Board to preserve its independence from Congress.

That is what Alan Blinder tells us in a Washington Post column today. Blinder tells us that the vast majority of academic economists and people in the financial industry oppose efforts to make the Fed more accountable to Congress. (He also bizarrely asserts that "very, very few" people support more Congressional control of the Fed. This would seem to be inconsistent with the support for the Paul-Grayson bill to audit the Fed.)

Representative Mel Watt (D-NC) is out to protect the independence of the Fed from the risk of an intrusive audit from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The risk comes in the form of a bill initiated by Ron Paul and Alan Grayson that calls for an audit of the Fed. The bill, which now has more than 300 co-sponsors, would allow Congress to find out who the Fed lent more than $2 trillion to through its special lending facilities, and under what terms. Congress would also be able to find out which countries were allowed to take advantage of dollar swaps at the peak of the financial crisis last fall.

President Obama's agreement with the drug industry to abandon negotiated Medicare drug prices for $80 billion in poorly specified savings, sounds like really bad deal.

President Obama wants a commission of medical experts to decide which treatments will be covered by Medicare. If we trust such a commission to make these choices for people receiving Medicare, why not trust them to make these choices for everyone?

The experts who claim to speak for financial markets are like mediums who claim to speak for the dead, except they have less credibility.

The media continue to rely almost exclusively on economists whose major qualifications are that they missed the housing bubble and then underestimated the severity of the downturn.

Iraq War levels of military spending will lead to far more job loss than Waxman-Markey, but for some reason the opponents of Waxman-Markey don't seem to care about military spending.

National Public Radio has joined the lobbying campaign in support of IMF bailout money.

Economists missed an $8 trillion housing bubble. But now they can do the right thing by supporting a third stimulus.