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.

Nouriel Roubini : A presidency heading for a fiscal train wreck

What has been the fiscal performance of President Barack Obama? He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as well as a budget deficit that – after much needed bail-outs and a series of reckless tax cuts – was already close to $1,000bn. His stimulus package, together with a backstop of the financial system, low rates and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, prevented another depression. Mr Obama also deserves credit that the US, alone among advanced economies, currently supports a “growth now”, rather than an “austerity now” path.

But this is but one half of the picture; we must also judge his first two years on his ability to anticipate what the economy will need tomorrow. Here the picture is much less positive. Given the likely path of fiscal policy after next Tuesday’s election – with the expiration of existing stimulus and transfer payments, and even with most of the 2001-03 tax cuts being kept – the US economy will soon experience serious fiscal drag just when it needs a further boost. Problematically, the administration’s failures leave it relying on the Fed, which is bent on further QE, likely to be announced next Wednesday. But studies show this will have little effect on US growth in 2011, so fiscal policy should be doing some of the lifting to prevent a double dip recession.

David Sirota: It’s the Stupidity, Stupid

Redistributionist-as epithets go, the moniker is so mild, so … 2008. Today, we’re hammered by screeds against Democrats’ alleged socialism and President Barack Obama’s supposed Marxism. The class war is clearly on-the paranoids and royalists of the world have united, seizing the means of propaganda production in these waning days of this year’s election campaign.

The onslaught, of course, is predictable. After all, this is an election season-which inevitably evokes Red-baiting crusades by the plutocrats. Less predictable is this crusade’s traction. As Wall Street executives make bank off bailouts, as millions of Americans see paychecks slashed and as our economic Darwinism sends more wealth up the income ladder-it’s surprising that appeals to capitalist piggery carry more electoral agency than ever.

What could cause this intensifying politics of free-market fundamentalism at the very historical moment that proves the failure of such an ideology? Two new academic studies suggest all roads lead to ignorance.

Michael Moore: A Boot to the Head …from Michael Moore

There she was, thrown to the pavement by a Republican in a checkered shirt. Another Republican thrusts his foot in between her legs and presses down with all his weight to pin her to the curb. Then a Republican leader comes over and viciously stomps on her head with his foot. You hear her glasses crunch under the pressure. Holding her head down with his foot, he applies more force so she can’t move. Her skull and brain are now suffering a concussion.

The young woman’s name is Lauren Valle, but she is really all of us. For come this Tuesday, the right wing — and the wealthy who back them — plan to take their collective boot and bring it down hard on not just the head of Barack Obama but on the heads of everyone they simply don’t like.

Rinku Sen: The Most Racist Campaign in Decades, and What It Demands of Us

If the election of 2008 was a referendum on race, the midterms are feeling like a recount. The dominant political discourse of 2008 centered on an improbable question: Could a black man overcome decades’ worth of conservative fear mongering about scary, criminal, lazy black people and win a majority of voters? Today, things have changed. Now, the question is whether invoking scary, criminal, lazy Latinos and Muslims can incite enough conservative voters to reverse the Democrats’ 2008 gains.

Across the country, candidates are competing for the title of Best Immigrant Basher and Most Opposed to Mosques. Republican candidates have vowed that, if they win, they will turn these campaign-trail memes into congressional hearings and use them to block reforms critical to all Americans in the midst of an ongoing economic crisis. Democratic candidates, for their part, have been deafeningly silent on the subject and have vowed-well, nothing. Today’s political landscape is as frightening as 2008’s was hopeful.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: [Katrina vanden Heuvel Washington State’s ‘Robin Hood’ Tax]

In an electoral development that must have Ayn Rand rolling in her grave, voters in Washington State will decide next Tuesday on I-1098, a.k.a. the “Robin Hood Initiative.” With no state income tax, Washingtonians currently suffer under what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer calls “the least fair tax code in America,” a schedule that sees the poorest 20 percent of Washington families pay 17.3 percent of their income in state taxes. Washington’s wealthiest 1 percent enjoy a rate of 2.5 percent, while the richest 0.1 percent, according to I-1098 supporter Nick Hanauer, pay “something like three-tenths of one percent.” The ballot measure would reform this regressive tax structure.

Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist who is actually a part of that richest 0.1 percent, sees Washington’s system, and the trickle-down, Reaganomic wisdom behind it, as “hogwash…. Where rich people don’t pay their share,” as he said in a conference call on Tuesday. “It’s a hellhole.” Arithmetically, he says, a tax code like Washington’s is ultimately unable to sustain a capitalist democracy.

William Rivers Pitt: The Downhill Run

The 2010 midterm elections go down on Tuesday, for good or ill. The pollsters, news people and bloggers have been going full bore for months covering the thing. Even the weather people have gotten into the act; word has it most of the country is going to get rained on come election day. Except for get-out-the-vote efforts, a final blizzard of campaign ads and perhaps one last scandal before the polls open, we are into the downhill run of this thing, and all that’s left is the voting and the counting.

And the beatings, of course. Par for the course these days. It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing: the fact that Tea Party activists are beating up women in public, or the fact that acts like this are not terribly surprising anymore.

John Nichols The Tea Party Constitution Versus the Thomas Jefferson Constitution

If O’Donnell, Johnson and their Tea’d-Off compatriots were even minimally serious about adhering to the founding document, they would all be thoughtful critics of the undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ardent foes of the Patriot Act and steady opponents of free trade deals that remove the authority of Congress to represent and serve the interests of American workers, farmers and communities. But then they would be Russ Feingold, and it goes against the Tea Party narrative-at least as it has been framed by the movement’s corporate paymasters and messaging consultants-to regard a progressive Democrat as the most ardent defender of the American experiment.

So it should be understood that O’Donnell, Miller, Angle, Buck, Johnson and the rest of the Tea Partisans who might be senators are talking about the Constitution as it was written or as the founders intended it. Rather, they are talking about the Constitution as they would like to see it rewritten and reinterpreted-with the help of the most activist Supreme Court in American history. While their intents are radical, their prospects must be seen in light of the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative majority have already reinterpreted the First Amendment’s free speech protection in a manner that extends the natural rights that the founders reserved for human beings to multinational corporations