I’m a big Dean Baker fan, but sometimes he just doesn’t get it. Take this post, in which he complains as follows:
It may not qualify as “The Big Lie,” but the media feel the need to constantly claim that young people can no longer afford to buy homes. The latest salvo is the Washington Post telling how young people have to live with their parents to save money for a down payment:
“The trade-off comes down to temporarily relinquishing a measure of independence to achieve a milestone increasingly out of reach for people their age.”
This is not true. Homeownership rates for people under age 35 are actually above their pre-pandemic level.
What Dean doesn’t appear to understand is that there’s a rule, unwritten though it may be, to which the major media must adhere. If a Democrat is in office, one must put a negative spin on everything in the economy. A corollary of that rule is that while, when a Republican is in office, one must scour Midwestern diners to interview fans of the current president, when a Democrat is in office there is no need to seek out and interview his or her supporters. Perhaps, to give the media the benefit of the doubt, they think that anyone with a brain considers such diner patrons risible curiosities while people who support Democrats are simply uninteresting rational people.
Despite Dean’s failure to understand this media-wide rule (or, more likely, expound on it, as I’m sure he’s actually aware), his economic analyses are well worth reading. I’m one of his Patreon supporters and he’s worth every dime. Well, actually it costs more than a dime.
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