Pondering the Pundits

“Pondering 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 Vote as if It Matters

Does it make sense to vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president? Sure, as long as you believe two things. First, you have to believe that it makes no difference at all whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump moves into the White House — because one of them will. Second, you have to believe that America will be better off in the long run if we eliminate environmental regulation, abolish the income tax, do away with public schools, and dismantle Social Security and Medicare — which is what the Libertarian platform calls for.

But do 29 percent of Americans between 18 and 34 believe these things? I doubt it. Yet that, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, is the share of millennial voters who say that they would vote for Mr. Johnson if the election took place now. And the preponderance of young Americans who say they’ll back Mr. Johnson or Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, appear to be citizens who would support Mrs. Clinton in a two-way race; including the minor party candidates cuts her margin among young voters from 21 points to just 5.

So I’d like to make a plea to young Americans: your vote matters, so please take it seriously.

Lucia Graves: Under President Trump, Flint water crises could be commonplace

When Donald Trump went to Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday in his first visit to the city since lead was detected in the water in 2014, he began, inappropriately enough, with a joke.

“It used to be cars were made in Flint, and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now, the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint,” Trump said.

In his appearance at a Methodist church Wednesday, Trump added that the lead poisoning “would have never happened if I were president”. On the contrary: under a president Trump, what happened in Flint could happen everywhere. It would be the inevitable outcome of what is quite possibly the only Trump policy we can be sure of: radical deregulation.

Leo W. Gerard: Morning In America Delivered By Democrats

Nine years after the Great Recession began during the tax- and regulation-slashing Bush administration, some startlingly good economic news arrived from Washington, D.C., last week.

The incomes of typical Americans rose in 2015 by 5.2 percent, the first significant boost to middle-class pay since the end of the Great Recession, and the largest, in percentage terms, ever recorded by the Census Bureau. In addition, the poverty rate fell 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1968.  Also smaller were the numbers of Americans without health insurance and suffering food insecurity.

That sounds good, right? Especially after all it took to pull out of the Bush recession. During the month Bush left office, 818,000 Americans lost their jobs. Unemployment increased to 10 percent before President Obama’s stimulus programs started ratcheting it down to the current 4.9 percent. Now, wages are beginning to rise again. It seems like an event that Ronald Reagan might call morning in America. But not the current Republican nominee. Trump says, “This country is a hellhole, and we’re going down fast.”

Charles M. Blow: Trump, Grand Wizard of Birtherism

So, on Friday the Grand Wizard of Birtherism against President Obama admitted that birtherism was bunk, not by apologizing for his prominent role in the racist campaign — no, that would have been too right — but by suggesting that he deserved credit for dousing the flames he’d fanned.

This man is so low that he’s subterranean. [..]

This is what Trump does: He exalts gossip and innuendo, which has the direct and opposite effect of degrading truth and honesty. He finds a lie in which the depraved have faith and he lifts it up as if it’s a secret that their opponents fear.

This is an enormous distraction, because it means that time and attention that could be put into exposing that Trump’s policies are either paper thin or laughably unworkable are instead diverted to disproving lies which usher forth from his mouth like water from a hose at full throttle.

And even when confronted with proof positive that his conspiracies are baseless, he often doesn’t back down, or if he does, he does so without apology.

He is not only bending the truth, he is breaking the notion that truth should matter in the first place.

Michael Paarlberg: It’s race and immigration, stupid

Under prevailing theories of economic voting, “Make America Great Again” should not be a good slogan for a time when poverty and unemployment are falling, and household income is rising, as the latest Census report shows. The fact that Trump’s faux-populist appeal resonates at all despite this should be evidence enough that it’s not about the economy. In any case, Trump’s more explicit promises about walls and religious tests should make it clear what American greatness really means to him.

Yet there are many who take Trump’s claims to an economic populist mantle seriously, including some on the left. So eager are they to find any evidence at all of a burgeoning American class consciousness that they project it onto an unlikely source, one who spends more on hair transplants than most Americans make in a year. [..]

Americans have never truly voted along class lines; a working class vote divided by racial issues is not the exception in American politics but the rule. But Trump has a lot of people confusing what is with what ought to be. A better case can be made for a pro-worker platform than fixed ideas about Trump voters. Politicians should cater to working class interests more not because there is, or ever has been, such thing as a unified working class vote, but because it’s the right thing to do.