“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 Big Lie
Republicans are telling Americans a big lie, and Obama and the Democrats are letting them. The Big Lie is that our economic problems are due to a government that’s too large, and therefore the solution is to shrink it.
The truth is our economic problems stem from the biggest concentration of income and wealth at the top since 1928, combined with stagnant incomes for most of the rest of us. The result: Americans no longer have the purchasing power to keep the economy going at full capacity. Since the debt bubble burst, most Americans have had to reduce their spending; they need to repay their debts, can’t borrow as before, and must save for retirement.
Joseph E. Stiglitz: Common Sense, Not Austerity, in 2011
New Year’s Hope against Hope
The time has come for New Year’s resolutions, a moment of reflection. When the last year hasn’t gone so well, it is a time for hope that the next year will be better.
For Europe and the United States, 2010 was a year of disappointment. It’s been three years since the bubble broke, and more than two since Lehman Brothers’ collapse. In 2009, we were pulled back from the brink of depression, and 2010 was supposed to be the year of transition: as the economy got back on its feet, stimulus spending could smoothly be brought down.
Growth, it was thought, might slow slightly in 2011, but it would be a minor bump on the way to robust recovery. We could then look back at the Great Recession as a bad dream; the market economy – supported by prudent government action – would have shown its resilience.
In fact, 2010 was a nightmare. The crises in Ireland and Greece called into question the euro’s viability and raised the prospect of a debt default. On both sides of the Atlantic, unemployment remained stubbornly high, at around 10%. Even though 10% of US households with mortgages had already lost their homes, the pace of foreclosures appeared to be increasing – or would have, were not it not for legal snafus that raised doubts about America’s vaunted “rule of law.”
Paul Krugman: Deep Hole Economics
If there’s one piece of economic wisdom I hope people will grasp this year, it’s this: Even though we may finally have stopped digging, we’re still near the bottom of a very deep hole.
Why do I need to point this out? Because I’ve noticed many people overreacting to recent good economic news. What particularly concerns me is the risk of self-denying optimism – that is, I worry that policy makers will look at a few favorable economic indicators, decide that they no longer need to promote recovery, and take steps that send us sliding right back to the bottom.
So, about that good news: various economic indicators, ranging from relatively good holiday sales to new claims for unemployment insurance (which have finally fallen below 400,000 a week), suggest that the great post-bubble retrenchment may finally be ending.
Dean Baker: Hugh Jidette Goes to Washington
By this point, many people have come across the name “Hugh Jidette,” the fictional presidential candidate created by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to advance its agenda of cutting Social Security and Medicare. In the more realistic version of this story we would have Hugh Janus, the Wall Street lobbyist who is constantly plotting ways to take away the benefits that tens of millions of retired workers depend upon.
Apologies for the descent into fourth-grade humor, but that is now the level of the public debate on budget and economic issues in Washington. Every chapter of this debate seems more corrupt and further removed from reality than the last one.
Lincoln Mitchell: Issa’s Investigations
In an alternate universe in which Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the new Chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee were a rational person with his country’s best interests at heart, the news that he was going to aggressively pursue investigations would be welcome. Issa is interested in investigating a range of issues including corruption in the war in Afghanistan, WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Food and Drug Administration. The American people deserve to know whether or to what extent corruption has become a problem in the war in Afghanistan, how a security lapse allowed WikiLeaks to get the documents it recently leaked and just how government agencies contributed to the mortgage and economic crises. This kind of accountability in essential to the functioning of a democracy; and investigations of this kind can be an important means of ensuring that accountability.
Passage of the New START treaty at the end of the 111th Congress should have been what Ploughshares Fund president and nuclear weapons expert Joseph Cirincione called a “no-brainer.” It is, after all, a renewal of a treaty originally negotiated by President Reagan and it will make America safer.
Yet the fact that herculean effort was required to win Senate ratification of a modest arms reduction treaty is a stark reminder of how tough it will be to strike needed, more far-reaching agreements – for example, slashing tactical nuclear weapons and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
The cynical Republican leadership mounted a ferocious and often mendacious opposition campaign to ratification of START. It was striking during the debate just how far this extremist GOP has strayed from common sense or rational thinking on national security. In its misguided determination to weaken the President and score political points, Senators Kyl, DeMint and McConnell, to name just a few, chose to repudiate urgent calls from scores of high level military and bipartisan political leaders, including the current and eight former commanders of the Strategic Command, the Defense Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the Missile Defense Agency, who all urged swift approval of the treaty.
In the end, only 13 Republicans voted to support the treaty; the majority chose retrograde party ideology over commonsense security.
Laura Flanders: Public Workers Getting Snowed
The snow is mostly melted after a near-record storm immobilized much of New York for nearly four days last week. But before non-New Yorkers gloat — beware — the Big Apple’s storm offers just a taste of a crop of problems that are likely to be coming your way.
Nationally, billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the toast of town for cutting budgets — and resisting raising any kind of taxes on Wall Street. He proposed to that snowed-in folks enjoy the snow day by taking in a Broadway show, but residents of Brooklyn and Queens weren’t lazing about, they were digging themselves out, or waiting for help — that didn’t come. And that wasn’t just the fault of the polar weather but their mayor’s priorities.
John Nichols: An Answer to 2011’s Austerity Arguments: ‘We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis’
First, Washington squandered our tax dollars enriching the corporate contractors that profiteer upon unnecessary and seemingly endless wars. The cost figure just for the Iraq imbroglio is now far in excess of $3 trillion, according to The Washington Post.
Next, Washington bailed out the big banks and the multinational corporations that got so greedy they wrecked themselves and the U.S. economy. How much dod that cost? In addition to the initial $800 billion shifted their way by President Bush and the Congress in 2008, there’s the little matter of the Federal Reserve’s “backdoor bailout”: low-interest loans and other deals doled out to the largest banks and corporatuions. According to data obtained by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, the 21,000 transactions from December 2007 through July 2010 that totaled more than $3 trillion.
Three trillion here, three trillion there… sooner or later, we’re talking about real money.
And a real big hole in the federal budget.
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