“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”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Paul Krugman: Dwindling Deficit Disorder
For three years and more, policy debate in Washington has been dominated by warnings about the dangers of budget deficits. A few lonely economists have tried from the beginning to point out that this fixation is all wrong, that deficit spending is actually appropriate in a depressed economy. But even though the deficit scolds have been wrong about everything so far – where are the soaring interest rates we were promised? – protests that we are having the wrong conversation have consistently fallen on deaf ears.
What’s really remarkable at this point, however, is the persistence of the deficit fixation in the face of rapidly changing facts. People still talk as if the deficit were exploding, as if the United States budget were on an unsustainable path; in fact, the deficit is falling more rapidly than it has for generations, it is already down to sustainable levels, and it is too small given the state of the economy.
Dean Baker: Don’t Be Fooled: 7.7% Is Likely a Short-Lived Low in the US Unemployment Rate
More than five years into the downturn, it doesn’t take much to get people excited about the state of the economy. The Labor Department’s February employment report showing the economy generated a better than expected 236,000 jobs and the unemployment rate had fallen 0.2 percentage points to 7.7% was sufficient to get the optimists’ blood flowing. Unfortunately, they are likely to be disappointed. [..]
While the unemployment rate has fallen back by 2.3 percentage points from its peak, reversing more than 40% of its increase, the EPOP is still down by 4.5 percentage points from its pre-recession level. The drop in unemployment is much more the result of people giving up the search for employment and leaving the labor force, than it is of workers finding new jobs.
Mary Jo White, President Obama’s nominee for chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, is expected to win Senate approval after her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. But unless Ms. White is aggressively questioned, neither the senators nor the public will have a clear idea of the kind of chairwoman she will be.
Those who want a get-tough approach with the financial industry will focus on her years as a top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, from 1993 to 2002. Those who want a Wall Street ally at the S.E.C. will focus on her work in the past 10 years as a corporate attorney, representing big banks and other major corporations.The public deserves more from the hearing than a foregone conclusion. Senators should press Ms. White to give specifics on how she would handle potential conflicts as well as her approach to the job: [..]
Ralph Nader: Why Are Democrats So Defeatist?
The Republicans are openly introspective about why they failed to regain the presidency and the Senate. It is time for the same kind of rigorous self-analysis by the Democrats, who floated through their failure to regain control of the House without apparent dismay. Their failure to dislodge Speaker John Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor assures that President Obama and congressional Democrats will get very little done for the next two years. [..]
There is no effort by the Democratic leadership to question the failed strategies of 2010 and 2012. For 2014, it is likely to be more of the same: raising the money and taking care not to offend business interests by talking vaguely about the middle class and ignoring the growing poorer classes that are the Democratic Party’s natural constituency. What all this presages is another loss in 2014-unless the Republican Party takes an even more extremist stand for the rich and powerful and saves the Democrats from their own unprecedented stagnation.
Robert Kuttner: When Public Is Better
The problem is not too much government, but too passive a government
Long before we thought of founding The American Prospect in 1989, I came to know Paul Starr through a prescient article titled “Passive Intervention.” The piece was published in 1979, in a now-defunct journal, Working Papers for a New Society.
As Paul and his co-author, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, observed, the American welfare state is built on terrible, even disabling compromises. Progressives often lack the votes to pass legislation to deliver public benefits directly. So they either create tax incentives or bribe the private sector to do the job, thus inflating a bloated system. “The problem is not too much government activism,” they wrote, “but too much passivity.”
Their two emblematic examples were housing and health care. In housing, tax advantages became an inflation hedge for the affluent and drove up prices. Low-income homeownership programs, run through the private sector, had huge default rates. In health care, the political compromises necessary to enact Medicare excluded serious cost containment. When they wrote this, health care consumed 9 percent of GDP compared to 17 percent today. The subprime mortgage scandal was decades in the future.
Michelle Chen: Day Laborers Defend Their Right to Public Space in Court
Looking to hire someone for a little landscaping work or a construction job? There might be a local agency that can offer free security services to ensure that workers will work as hard as possible for as little as you’re willing to pay: the local police department.
Across the country, the undocumented day laborers who build, paint and pave many communities are locked into a low-wage regime that is de facto enforced by state power, which can threaten to round them up just for trying to work–in the name of protecting “public safety.”
Arizona was once a model for this form of anti-worker bullying. But a federal court has just struck down one of the harshest provisions of the infamous anti-immigrant law known as SB 1070, which enabled police to arrest people for soliciting work in public.
Recent Comments