Matthew Wald of The New York Times recently reported on the success of a new Department of Energy program Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, better known as ARPA-E, because the government grants were not receiving private sector support. The ARPA-E program is designed to fund high-risk, high-reward projects that the private sector would not embark upon on its own. Specifically ARPA-E is “responsible for funding specific high-risk, high-payoff, game-changing research and development projects to meet the nation’s long-term energy challenges.”

One example Wald points to is FloDesign. He writes, “FloDesign, which is working on a more efficient … Continue Reading

In a January 19th article title “The White House Looks for Work” The New York Times Peter Baker reports:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, known as the stimulus, produced or saved at least 1.9 million jobs and as many as 4.7 million last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Someone reading this sentence might conclude that the CBO has analyzed actual real world data taken before, during, and after the stimulus and concluded that it saved jobs. This is completely false. The CBO job estimate numbers are based off of a computer model that does not incorporate any … Continue Reading

On January 19th, David Leonhardt of the New York Times reported on why unemployment in the United States has been persistently high relative to other countries such as Britain, Japan, Russia and Germany. In his article, “In Wreckage of Lost Jobs, Lost Power,” Leonhardt first discusses the lack of power employees in the United States saying, “American employers operate with few restraints. Unions have withered, at least in the private sector, and courts have grown friendlier to business. Many companies can now come much closer to setting the terms of their relationship with employees,

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On Decemeber 17th, The New York Times Brian Stelter reported on a study conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org purporting to show that Fox News Channel was a major purveyor of “misinformation” communicated to the electorate. Stelter typed:

According to the study, which can be reviewed online, in most cases, the more a person watched and read the news, the less likely they were to have been misled about the facts. But “there were however a number of cases where greater exposure to a news source increased misinformation on a specific issue,” the study’s authors wrote. In particular, they found that regular viewers

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John Collins Rudolf of the New York Times wrote on December 14th about a “peak coal” problem potentially facing China and could stunt the country’s rapid economic growth. Rudolf writes, “China’s ravenous appetite for energy puts the country at risk of reaching a point of “peak coal,” when demand for coal will outstrip domestic production capacity, a growing number of experts believe.

China now consumes approximately 47 percent of coal produced globally but by most estimates has just 14 percent of global coal reserves. Meanwhile, demand has risen by about 10 percent per year for the last decade, … Continue Reading

Brian Stelter reports in the December 20th New York Times that Democratic Federal Communications Commissioners Michael Copps will vote in favor allowing the federal government, for the first time ever, to regulate the internet. According to Stelter, Copps will vote for regulation to ensure that the Internet “doesn’t travel down the same road of special interest consolidation and gate-keeper control that other media and telecommunications industries — radio, television, film and cable — have traveled. ….What an historic tragedy it would be, to let that fate befall the dynamism of the Internet.”

Stelter allows Copps statement to be the final … Continue Reading

Reporting on votes in the House and Senate to end the practice of Congressional earmarking, The New York Times‘ A.G. Sulzberger reported on November 22nd:

Earmarks, which for all their controversy account for less than half of 1 percent of total federal spending, allow lawmakers to specify how money is used in their home states. If they were eliminated, Congress would cede more authority over spending decisions to the executive branch.

This is just plain false. There is not a zero sum game between Congress and the Executive branch when it comes to who gets to how to spend transportation dollars.

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Sewell Chan of the New York Times wrote an article on October 22 on the White House’s proposal to restrain trade imbalances and work with G-20 nations to “agree to curb persistent surpluses and deficits that could contribute to the next financial crisis.” The White House released a letter from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner he wrote to G-20 nations to reduce external imbalances (positive or negative) below four percent of gross domestic product within the next four years.

Chen writes that “Four countries have current-account surpluses exceeding 4 percent: Saudi Arabia (6.7 percent), Germany (6.1 percent), China (4.7 … Continue Reading

In an article titled, Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts, New York Times reporter Kate Zernike provides an accurate description of the philosophical works behind the Tea Party movement that advocate for limited government involvement in the economy. She mentions Frederic Bastiat’s The Law, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and The 5000 Year Leap, among others. But Zernike is wrong when she suggests the Tea Party movement “has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas.”

These ideas are anything but long-dormant. Although their popularity may be … Continue Reading

Simon Romero of The New York Times romanticizes the benefits of Venezuela’s new government-owned cafes without discussing the larger effects government control has over the economy. Romero describes two new state-owned cafes that opened this year in Venezuela and how they serve coffee and snacks grown and produced within the country. The prices for these goods, and others, are kept artificially lower than its competitors. Romero writes:

The planners behind the cafes have multiple objectives: to provide food and conviviality at democratic prices, to serve as commercial linchpins to renew some of the city’s

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Elizabath Rosenthal’s September 16th New York Times article “As Europe Kicks Coal, Hungarian Town Suffers” does contain some useful reminders about how wedded Europe still is to coal power. Specifically, she reports:

Determined to reduce Europe’s reliance on coal, the European Commission is fighting a complicated battle against the subsidies that have long sustained coal, an influential but polluting industry in Europe and in the United States. In May, the Brussels-based governing body for the European Union announced that economic bailouts and favors for coal mines and power plants were forbidden after this year, precipitating Vertesi’s demise.

But just how “determined” … Continue Reading

Celebrating the six-month anniversary of President Barack Obama’s health care law, The New York Times Kevin Sack writes:

Starting now, insurance companies will no longer be permitted to exclude children because of pre-existing health conditions, which the White House said could enable 72,000 uninsured to gain coverage. Insurers also will be prohibited from imposing lifetime limits on benefits.

The law will now forbid insurers to drop sick and costly customers after discovering technical mistakes on applications. It requires that they offer coverage to children under 26 on their parents’ policies.

It establishes a menu of preventive procedures, like colonoscopies, mammograms and immunizations,

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Clifford Krauss’ and John Broder’s report in the August 25th New York Times claims that industry and government projections of job losses due to the Obama administration’s deepwater drilling moratorium are unlikely. They write:

Yet the worst of those forecasts has failed to materialize, as companies wait to see how long the moratorium will last before making critical decisions on spending cuts and layoffs. Unemployment claims related to the oil industry along the Gulf Coast have been in the hundreds, not the thousands, and while oil production from the gulf is down because of the drilling halt, supplies from the

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John Collins Rudolf of The New York Times notes several differences between the fire that occurred last week on Mariner’s production platform and the drilling rig explosion that occurred at the Macondo well on April 20th. The fire at the Mariner production platform (Vermilion 380-A) did not kill or injure anyone and the workers shut all the wells before fleeing the platform to ensure no oil leaked into the ocean. But Rudolf creates a false assumption that what happened at the Mariner platform could have been just like the BP oil spill and twice refers to the … Continue Reading

The August 29th New York Times Week in Review featured an article entitled, “Policy Options Dwindle as Economic Fear Grows,” by Peter S. Goodman. As Goodman recounts the drumbeat of bad economic data released in recent days and the obstacles to using traditional “stimulus,” he offers this explanation for why Congress is reluctant to add more to the national debt:

The dramatic expansion of the national debt — which began in the Bush administration, via hefty tax cuts and two wars — has ratcheted up fears that, one day, creditors like China and Japan might demand sharply

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Pakistan’s foreign minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, appealed for aid from the international community telling reporters: “Climate change, with all its severity and unpredictability, has become a reality for 170 million Pakistanis. The present situation in Pakistan reconfirms our extreme vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change.” The New York Times Nathanial Gronewold then added on August 20th:

Both Qureshi and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hinted that they would use the Pakistan crisis to spur the now-stalled international climate talks. At the very least, the disaster shows that massive funding is needed to make the developing world more resilient

… Continue Reading

On January 1, 2011, every American who pays taxes is set to see their tax bill rise. The lowest personal income bracket will see their taxes rise from 10% - 15%. the 25% bracket will rise to 28%, the old 28% bracket will rise to 31%, the 33% bracket will rise to 36%, and the old 35% bracket will rise to 39.6%. But son’t look for the words “hike”, “rise”, or “raise” any where near the word “tax” in Jackie Calmes coverage of the issue for the August 10th New York Times.

Instead of informing readers about who’s taxes are … Continue Reading

Jim Kirk argues in the August 13th New York Times that since Congress is not moving forward with cap and trade legislation, the Chicago Climate Exchange, the nation’s only buyer and seller of carbon credits, is suffering. Kirk says, “Although carbon trading is robust in Europe, Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the Chicago Climate Exchange, painted a gloomy outlook for a robust cap-and-trade market in the United States.”

While is true absent a cap and trade policy, the future of the Chicago Climate Change is gloomy, Kirk is simply wrong to say that carbon trading is robust in … Continue Reading

The August 6th New York Times included a lengthy Michael Cooper article titled “Governments Go to Extremes as the Downturn Wears On” recounting cutbacks in government programs in Hawaii, Georgia, and Colorado. In 2,632 words we do find out that Hawaii owns “billions of dollars to a pension system that has only 68.8 percent of the money it needs to cover its promises” and that Clayton County Georgia spends $8 million a year on its bus system, and that Colorado Springs saved $1.2 million by shutting off streetlights this winter, but no where are we told just how big … Continue Reading

In a report comparing the costs of nuclear energy and solar energy, New York Times reporter Diana Powers gives an unfair critique of nuclear power and glorifies solar energy by ignoring the challenges of bringing it online. Powers points to a study that says electricity produced from solar photovoltaic cells could be cheaper than nuclear and that nuclear’s costs are on the rise while solar’s costs are on the decline. The Times later amended the article to say, “In raising several questions about this issue and the economics of nuclear power, the article failed to point out, … Continue Reading

In a “report” on Ireland’s economy, Liz Alderman of the New York Times assumes a Keynesian approach would make Ireland better off than its current economic state. Alderman reported June 29th, “Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession. “

Aside from signs that Ireland’s economy appears to be turning the corner, what makes Alderman think that a stimulus would have triggered … Continue Reading

Reporting on President Barack Obama’s desire for billions more of deficit stimulus spending, The New York Times‘ David Sanger and Sewell Chan report:

Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council and the economic adviser at Mr. Obama’s elbow, argued that the effects of last year’s $787 billion spending program had not fully kicked in.

President Obama’s stimulus may have only totaled $787 billion when Congressional critics first voted against it, but its costs have increased since then. According to revised accounting by the Congressional Budget Office released this January, because the … Continue Reading