“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”
New York Times Editorial; The Hollow Cry of ‘Broke’
“We’re broke! We’re broke!” Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday. “We’re broke in this state,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said a few days ago. “New Jersey’s broke,” Gov. Chris Christie has said repeatedly. The United States faces a “looming bankruptcy,” Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
It’s all obfuscating nonsense, of course, a scare tactic employed for political ends. A country with a deficit is not necessarily any more “broke” than a family with a mortgage or a college loan. And states have to balance their budgets. Though it may disappoint many conservatives, there will be no federal or state bankruptcies.
The federal deficit is too large for comfort, and most states are struggling to balance their books. Some of that is because of excessive spending, and much is because the recession has driven down tax revenues. But a substantial part was caused by deliberate decisions by state and federal lawmakers to drain government of resources by handing out huge tax cuts, mostly to the rich. As governments begin to stagger from the self-induced hemorrhaging, Republican politicians like Mr. Boehner and Mr. Walker cry poverty and use it as an excuse to break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.
Robert Reich: How Democrats Can Become Relevant Again (And Rescue the Nation While They’re At It)
Republicans offered Democrats two more weeks before the doomsday shut-down. Democrats countered with four. Republicans held their ground. Democrats agreed to two.
This is what passes for compromise in our nation’s capital.
Democrats have become irrelevant. If they want to be relevant again they have to connect the dots: The explosion of income and wealth among America’s super-rich, the dramatic drop in their tax rates, the consequential devastating budget squeezes in Washington and in state capitals, and the slashing of public services for the middle class and the poor.
Nicholas D. Kristof: Here’s What We Can Do to Tackle Libya
In 1986, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave an interview to a group of female foreign journalists. Then he invited them, one by one, into a room furnished with just a bed and television and propositioned them.
They rebuffed him, and after three successive rejections he got the message and gave up. But the incident reflects something important about Colonel Qaddafi that is worth remembering today: He’s nuts.
The Libyan “king of kings” blends delusion, menace, pomposity, a penchant for risk-taking – and possession of tons of mustard gas. That’s why it’s crucial that world powers, working with neighboring countries like Egypt and Tunisia, steadily increase the pressure while Colonel Qaddafi is wobbling so that he leaves the scene as swiftly as possible.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: No glory for governors trying to do the right fiscal thing
If you want to get national attention as a governor these days, don’t try to be innovative about solving the problems you were elected to deal with – in education, transportation and health care. No, if you want ink and television time, just cut and cut and cut some more.
Almost no one in the national media is noticing governors who say the reasonable thing: that state budget deficits, caused largely by drops in revenue in the economic downturn, can’t be solved by cuts or tax increases alone.
There is nothing courageous about an ideological governor hacking away at programs that partisans of his philosophy, including campaign contributors, want eliminated. That’s staying in your comfort zone.
Jim Hightower: The Kochs and the Guv Stir up a Hornets’ Nest
Thank you, Scott Walker! And you, too, Charles and David Koch! Thanks for being so ham-handed in pushing your self-serving, virulently anti-union agenda on the schoolteachers, health care workers, park rangers and other public employees of Wisconsin.
The Birchite billionaire Koch brothers and Walker, their gubernatorial hatchet man in the Badger State, have unwittingly done a tremendous favor for our country’s progressive movement. Thanks to them, America’s workaday majority has been awakened. With eyes wide open, middle-class working folks everywhere now have their attention riveted on Wisconsin, where a plutocratic, autocratic conspiracy between uber-wealthy corporate elites and obsequious GOP politicos has raised its ugly head for all to see.
Amy Goodman: The Battle of the Budgets: New Fronts in the Afghan and Iraq Wars
Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Idaho … these are the latest fronts in the battle of budgets, with the larger fight over a potential shutdown of the U.S. government looming. These fights, radiating out from the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol building, are occurring against the backdrop of the two wars waged by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. No discussion or debate over budgets, over wages and pensions, over deficits, should happen without a clear presentation of the costs of these wars-and the incalculable benefits that ending them would bring.
First, the cost of war. The U.S. is spending about $2 billion a week in Afghanistan alone. That’s about $104 billion a year – and that is not including Iraq. Compare that with the state budget shortfalls. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “some 45 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls totaling $125 billion for fiscal year 2012.” The math is simple: The money should be poured back into the states, rather than into a state of war.
John Nochols: Why a Wisconsin Sheriff Refuses to Serve as Governor Walker’s “Palace Guard”
No one has worked harder – and smarter – to keep the peace in Madison during the dispute over Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to crush public employee unions than Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney.
A veteran lawman who came up through the ranks of the sheriff’s department in the state’s second largest county before being elected sheriff in 2006, he’s hugely popular in the capital county – winning reelection in 2010 with 71 percent of the vote. He’s also hugely respected, as a key contributor to the work of the Governor’s Council on Domestic Violence, the Governor’s Council on Wisconsin Homeland Security, the Wisconsin Supreme Court Task Force on Mental Health and Criminal Justice System, Wisconsin law-enforcement groups and the National Sheriff’s Association.
That respect has served Sheriff Mahoney as he has worked long hours to help coordinate the response of various law-enforcement agencies to demonstrations that have attracted over 100,000 people, round-the-clock sleep-ins and sit-ins at the state Capitol and even clashing rallies between a small Tea Party contingent and a very large union crowd.
There has been no serious violence, no serious destruction and no serious arrests.
Ted Rall: The Phony Budget Crisis: Forget Austerity, Tax the Rich
Everywhere you look, from the federal government to the states to your hometown, budget crises abound. Services are being slashed. Politicians and pundits from both parties tell us that the good times are over, that we’ve got to start living within our means.
It’s a lie.
Two case studies have made news lately: California, where new/old governor Jerry Brown is trying to close a $25 billion shortfall with a combination of draconian cuts in public services and a series of regressive tax increases, and Wisconsin, where right-winger Scott Walker says getting rid of unions would eliminate the state’s $137 million deficit.
Never mind the economists, most of whom say an economic death spiral is exactly the worst possible time for government to cut spending. Pro-austerity propaganda has won the day with the American public. A new Rasmussen poll funds that 58 percent of likely voters would approve of a shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut.
Laura Flanders: Capital or Community in Wisconsin?
It should be the sound of the other shoe dropping, but you’ll have to listen hard to Governor Scott Walker’s budget address because most media will miss most of it.
It’s a funny thing about covering budgets. Cutting spending garners a whole lot more attention than cutting taxes. How many Americans know, for example, that Governor Walker gave $140 million in tax breaks to corporations — right before he announced this fiscal year’s deficit of $137 million?
The good people I met last week at the Wisconsin Budget Project call that a structural deficit. I’d go further. It’s not only structural; it’s structured – to bring about exactly this phony budget crisis.
As Scott Walker refuses to budge on his so-called budget repair bill, Wisconsin is bracing now for his actual budget. It’s anticipated to cut almost a billion from education, literally scuttling public schools in heavily African-American cities like Milwaukee. And we already know Walker’s plans include shrinking Medicaid while privatizing public utilities, cutting off yet more routes for public revenue.
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