I am happy to say that I know Dean Baker, read his blog Beat The Press almost daily, and constantly learn from and am amused by his posts about how the media misreports economic news.  If you haven''t already bookmarked Dean's blog, stop reading this now and get that done.

(Okay, enough sucking up.)

But Dean and many other economists missed something important last week when they insisted last week that the nominal all-time high fiscal 2009 deficit projected by the Bush administration in its midsession review was not important and dismissed out-of-hand the reporting of that as a record.

They're right, of course.  The deficit as a percent of GDP is the meaningful number in terms of its economic impact.

Brad Delong, who obviously never sleeps and, therefore, makes it hard for the rest of us who do to keep up, has an interesting post from Dean Baker (follow the bouncing ball here) about how those who expouse free market capitalism whenever and however they can are getting on board the notion of a federal bailout for Wall Street and homeowners.

As I've said before, as soon as the Bear Sterns deal became acceptable, it was only a matter of time -- in this case, really only a matter of days -- before a homeowner bailout was discussed seriously. Yesterday, two days after the end of the Easter recess, Congress confirmed that when Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell agreed that a plan had to move forward. The resulting bi-partisan vote to consider specific plans was overwhelming.

Dean Baker had an interesting post yesterday in his blog about how best to determine whether earmarks have grown. It's Dean Baker in the best Dean Baker tradition, that is, insisting that numbers be put in context.