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.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Robert Reich: The New Tax Deal: Reaganomics Redux

More than thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan came to Washington intent on reducing taxes on the wealthy and shrinking every aspect of government except defense.

The new tax deal embodies the essence of Reaganomics.

It will not stimulate the economy.

A disproportionate share of the $858 billion deal will go to people in the top 1 percent who spend only a fraction of what they earn and save the rest. Their savings are sent around the world to wherever they will earn the highest return.

The only practical effect of adding $858 billion to the deficit will be to put more pressure on Democrats to reduce non-defense spending of all sorts, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as education and infrastructure.

It is nothing short of Ronald Reagan’s (and David Stockman’s) notorious “starve the beast” strategy.

In 2012, an election year, when congressional Democrats have less power than they do now, the pressure to extend the Bush tax cuts further will be overwhelming.

Worse yet, the deal adds to the underlying structural problem that caused the Great Recession in the first place.

Paul Krugman: Wall Street Whitewash

When the financial crisis struck, many people – myself included – considered it a teachable moment. Above all, we expected the crisis to remind everyone why banks need to be effectively regulated.

How naïve we were. We should have realized that the modern Republican Party is utterly dedicated to the Reaganite slogan that government is always the problem, never the solution. And, therefore, we should have realized that party loyalists, confronted with facts that don’t fit the slogan, would adjust the facts.

Which brings me to the case of the collapsing crisis commission.

The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was established by law to “examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.” The hope was that it would be a modern version of the Pecora investigation of the 1930s, which documented Wall Street abuses and helped pave the way for financial reform.

Instead, however, the commission has broken down along partisan lines, unable to agree on even the most basic points.

Eugene Robinson: In Afghanistan, on track to nowhere

The good news is that President Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan is “on track.” The bad news is that the track runs in a circle.

There have been “notable operational gains” in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, according to a National Security Council-led assessment released Thursday, but this progress is “fragile and reversible.” This sounds like a bureaucratic way of admitting that we take two steps forward, followed by two steps back. Indeed, the review acknowledges that after nine years of war, “Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to be the operational base for the group that attacked us on 9/11.”

What’s not reversible is the human toll of Obama’s decision to escalate the war. This has been by far the deadliest year for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, with 489 killed. It has also been a brutal year for Afghan and Pakistani civilians caught in the middle of what increasingly looks like a classic war of attrition – except with missile-firing robot aircraft circling overhead.

David Sirota: Just-Released IRS Data Show Effects of Our Radical New Greed-Is-Good Culture

As the House considers a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top 2%, slash corporate taxes and potentially make the Estate Tax more generous to billionaires than ever before, it’s instructive to put the move into a larger cultural/historical context. And thanks to newly released IRS documents, we can do just that.

As the Institute for Policy Studies reports, officials at the National Archives recently released a 67-year-old U.S. Treasury Department report detailing what the richest Americans once paid in taxes in the middle of the 20th century. IPS notes that “We have simply never had clearer evidence of just how much America used to expect out of individual wealthy Americans — and just how little, by comparison, we expect out of our wealthy today.”

Bill McKibben: Everything Is Negotiable, Except With Nature: You Can’t Bargain About Global Warming With Chemistry and Physics

The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory. “The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine,” said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican foreign minister who brokered the final compromise, described it as “the best we could achieve at this point in a long process.”          

The conference did indeed make progress on a few important issues: the outlines of financial aid for developing countries to help them deal with climate change, and some ideas on how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions in China and India. But it basically ignored the two crucial questions: How much carbon will we cut, and how fast?

On those topics, one voice spoke more eloquently than all the 9,000 delegates, reporters, and activists gathered in Cancún.

And he wasn’t even there. And he wasn’t even talking about climate.

Nate Silver: A Bayesian Take on Julian Assange

 The handling of the case has been highly irregular from the start, in ways that would seem to make clear that the motivation for bringing the charges is political.

   Does that mean, however, that the underlying charges themselves are spurious, trumped up, outright false, or otherwise dubious? (Some have speculated, for instance, that Mr. Assange may have been entrapped.) No, not for certain, of course – but it does have an impact on the probabilities.

   …

   What is less ambiguous here, however – as in the case of my bullet train analogy – is the underlying context. The handling of the charges suggests that the motivation for bringing them against Mr. Assange is political. If the motivation is political, then the merits of the charges might matter less. Even if they fail to result in a conviction, the authorities might nevertheless succeed in, in essence, incapacitating Mr. Assange for several months, and preventing him from releasing further documents through WikiLeaks. They might also injure Mr. Assange’s reputation among the public: certainly I have learned more about details Mr. Assange’s personal life in recent days than I would care to know.

Dan Froomkin: After Bucking Holbrooke’s Advice On Afghanistan, Obama Invokes His Name

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama asserted on Thursday that the White House’s questionable assessment of progress in Afghanistan “reflect[s] the dedication of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whose memory we honor and whose work we’ll continue.”

There’s little doubt that the president’s chief envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who died Monday of complications from an aortic dissection, tried his damnedest to make Obama’s strategy work.

But the reality is that a year ago, when Obama was choosing between escalation and deescalation in the region, Holbrooke was one of several top advisors who cautioned him that the path he ultimately chose — sending in 30,000 more American troops — simply could not succeed.

Behind closed doors, Holbrooke was widely known to be one of the most voluble members of a high-level faction that Obama chose to spurn.

In Obama’s War, Bob Woodward writes that Holbrooke considered it a “central truth” that the war “would not end in a military victory,” but rather when the warring parties were “brought together diplomatically.”