Punting the Pundits

“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.

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Paul Krugman: Those Revolting Europeans

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it’s about time.

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity – and that’s a good thing.

Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is “rather dangerous,” declared The Economist, which observed that he “genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society.” Quelle horreur!

Harold Meyerson: Europe finds austerity a tight fit

Europe has seen austerity, and it doesn’t work. [..]

The United States has austerity demons of its own, of course. While the private sector has rebounded somewhat from the 2008-09 collapse, creating 4 million jobs since the turnaround began in 2010, state and local governments have shed 611,000 employees – including 196,000 teachers – since President Obama took office, The Post’s Zachary A. Goldfarb reported. The shrinking of government ranks high among the drags on the U.S. recovery. The 2009 stimulus provided funding to states and cities that enabled them to keep many workers on the job, but when that funding began running out in 2010, layoffs, particularly among teachers, redoubled.

The lesson of 2008 was that unregulated finance ends in disaster. The lesson of the years since is that austerity in a time of economic weakness not only perpetuates that disaster but makes it worse. The world, one might think, would have learned this lesson from the 1930s; Germany, at least, should have. Alas, it apparently has to be relearned, painfully, again and again.

Robert Reich: A Question of Timing: What America Can Learn from the Revolt in Europe

Who’s an economy for? Voters in France and Greece have made it clear it’s not for the bond traders.

Referring to his own electoral woes, Prime Minister David Cameron wrote Monday in an article in the conservative Daily Telegraph: “When people think about the economy they don’t see it through the dry numbers of the deficit figures, trade balances or inflation forecasts – but instead the things that make the difference between a life that’s worth living and a daily grind that drags them down.” [..]

In truth, the choice isn’t simply between budget-cutting austerity, on the one hand, and growth and jobs on the other.

It’s really a question of timing. And it’s the same issue on this side of the pond. If government slices spending too early, when unemployment is high and growth is slowing, it makes the debt situation far worse.

The Guardian Editorial: François Hollande: the change France needs

François Hollande has a rare opportunity to reshape the political landscape in a country whose default position is to the right

François Hollande won a stunning victory, not just for himself, as a man who spent much of his career in the shadow of others, nor for France, but for the left in Europe, too. With the governing parties who preached austerity under attack from a voter revolt on Sunday- in the Greek elections, where the extreme right was set to win enough votes to enter parliament; in Schleswig-Holstein, where the vote of Angela Merkel’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats, collapsed – the breakthrough of the left in France was a huge achievement and, just maybe, a turning point.

Nicolas Sarkozy is the 11th European leader to fall since the banking crisis broke and this result is more than just a shot across the bows for the former Sarkozy loyalists in Ms Merkel or David Cameron. France’s new direction is a mortal blow to the austerity compact which has been Europe’s anchor response to the crisis. Mr Hollande is no radical. Conscious of how polarised France has become between left and right, he wanted his supporters to celebrate, not demonstrate. He has set himself just one year longer to balance France’s budget than the man he defeated. But he arrives in power at that point in history where the victims of boom and bust, rather than its perennially self-satisfied authors, have become the dominant political voice.

Joan Walsh: Let Biden be Biden

The VP comes out for same sex marriage. Then his office insists he “was saying what the president has said”

For cryin’ out loud.

Sunday morning on “Meet the Press” Vice President Joe Biden went completely Joe Biden on the issue of marriage equality, telling David Gregory “I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women and heterosexual men marrying women are entitled to the same exact rights,” and crediting “Will and Grace.” That’s the Joe Biden we know and love. [..]

It seemed an important step for an administration that can’t seem to get the president all the way there. President Obama is going to have to come out for gay marriage one of these days – can anyone honestly believe he’s against it? – but having the Catholic Biden endorse it helps, too. The group Catholic Democrats immediately Tweeted the little known fact that Catholics are the most pro-gay marriage of all Christian groups. Yet the backwards politics of the U.S. Bishops means most people don’t know that, and thus view gay marriage as a no-fly zone during an election season when the  Catholic swing vote is particularly important. So Biden’s comment mattered.

A’ex Pareene: America’s idiot rich

The 1 percent is complaining louder than ever. There can be no reasoning with people this irrational

Some unknown but alarming number of ultra-rich Americans are now basically totally delusional and completely divorced from reality. This is now an inescapable fact, confirmed by multiple media accounts of billionaire thought and an entire special issue of the New York Times Magazine. [..]

There can be no reasoning with people this irrational. Any attempt to do so will fail, as Barack Obama, whose main goal is to maintain, not upend, the system that made these people so disgustingly wealthy, is learning. It’s growing harder and harder to pretend that the fantastically wealthy have a sophisticated understanding of politics – or math, or economics, or cause-and-effect.

Dana Milbank: Taking out Dick Lugar

When Indiana Republicans go to the polls on Tuesday, they will do more than choose a candidate for the Senate. They will choose between party and country. [..]

For years Dick Lugar has been the leading Senate Republican on foreign policy, shaping post-Cold War strategy, securing sanctions to end South African apartheid and bringing democracy to the Philippines, among other things. His signature achievement, drafted with Democrat Sam Nunn, was the 1992 Nunn-Lugar Act, which has disarmed thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads once aimed at the United States.

Enter Richard Mourdock, a tea party hothead attempting to defeat Lugar in the GOP primary. A cornerstone of his effort to oust Lugar is the six-term senator’s bad habit of bipartisanship – never mind that Lugar’s bipartisanship was in the service of protecting millions of Americans from nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism.