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”.
Jamelle Bouie: Washington: ‘Let’s Cut Spending!’ The Public: ‘Let’s Raise Taxes!’
Conservatives are fond of claiming the United States as a “center-right country,” but public opinion polling routinely shows a country of people who amenable-if not enthusiastic-about liberal solutions to public policy problems. For example, in a recent Pew survey, when asked what they would support to cut the deficit, large majorities support a grab bag of liberal policies: raising the Social Security contribution cap, raising taxes on high-income earners, reducing our military presence, and limiting tax deductions for large corporations. . . . .
This holds true even when broken down by partisan affiliation. Along with 73 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of independents, 54 percent of Republicans support the Social Security contribution cap. Likewise, 56 percent of Republicans want to reduce our military commitments abroad, and 62 percent want to limit tax deductions for large corporations.
In other words, the deficit conversation in Washington-with it’s near-obsessive focus on spending cuts above all other solutions-is wildly out-of-sync with public preferences.
Paul Krugman: Inflation Fears Rising Faster Than Prices in US and Europe
Two questions about inflation:
1. What would the European Central Bank be doing if it were the Federal Reserve?
2. Why have some measures of core inflation in the United States ticked up slightly recently?
On the first question, Eurostat offers a consumer price index online sans energy, food and tobacco (which is more or less U.S.-style core). If you look at the 12-month change, the euro zone looks like the United States – there is no good reason to raise rates. To be fair, on the labor side things look a bit different: there are actual labor shortages in some parts of Europe, reflecting both low labor mobility and the extreme asymmetry of the European shock. But raising rates for all of Europe because parts of Germany are doing well is, as I’ve written before, worse than the one-size-fits-all policy euroskeptics warned about. It’s one size fits one. And the case for a somewhat higher inflation target is even stronger for the euro zone than it is for the United States.
Meanwhile, back in the new country: Core inflation in the United States has ticked up slightly recently. What’s that about?
Laugh me off as the idealistic son of a physician (which I am), but I still thought the doctor’s ethos of “first do no harm” was a notion we could all agree on. Even in this hyper-polarized Era of the Screaming Red-Faced Partisan, I thought we would witness the recent Fukushima reactor meltdown or footage of Americans setting their tap water on fire and at least agree to stop pursuing energy policies that we know endanger our health and safety-if not out of altruism, then out of self-interest.
How embarrassingly naive I was. That, or I momentarily forgot that this isn’t just any industrialized country-this is America circa 2011, a haven of hubris that has become hostile to the “do no harm” principle.
This makes us different from, say, Japan and Germany when it comes to nuclear power. Scarred by fallout, the former has canceled plans to build 14 new nuclear plants and has radically altered its energy agenda, now moving to pursue solar rather than atomic energy. Likewise, according to The Associated Press, the latter reacted to Japan’s plight by voting “in favor of a ban on nuclear power from 2022 onward.”
Robert Parry: Making the US Economy “Scream”
Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.
Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.
To stop this spread of “socialism,” nearly anything goes. Take, for example, Chile in the early 1970s when socialist President Salvador Allende won an election and took steps aimed at improving the conditions of the country’s poor.
Sarah Anderson: Cut Wall Street Down to Size With a Financial Speculation Tax
If you want to transform the economy, you have to cut Wall Street down to its proper size. One way to do that is to tax the short-term speculative activities that dominate and distort financial markets.
For ordinary investors, the costs would be negligible, like a tiny insurance fee to protect against crashes caused by speculation. But for the highfliers who are most responsible for the financial crisis, the tax could raise the cost of highly leveraged derivatives trading and stock-flipping enough to discourage the most dangerous behavior.
Remember the “flash crash” of May 6, 2010, when the Dow plummeted nearly 1,000 points? If a tax of only 0.25 percent on each transaction had been in place for just the twenty most frenzied minutes of that day, traders would’ve faced $142 million in fees.
John Nichols: Fraud in Fitzwalkerstan: A Legislator is Lying
Wisconsin State Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, is proud of the fact that his Republican Party is recruiting and running spoiler candidates in Democratic primaries for the seats of GOP senators who are being recalled.
These races will decide who will control the upper house of the legislature in a state that now has one-party rule-and a governor who is bent on using all of that power to break labor unions, slash education funding and begin a process of dismantling some of the best Medicaid-supported state healthcare programs in the nation.
Governor Scott Walker could not do any of these things without a pliant legislature. And Fitzgerald (with his brother, Jeff, the Assembly Speaker) keeps things working for Walker.
Scott Fitzgerald, a longtime ally of the governor (who recently appointed Fitzgerald’s father to head the State Patrol) is Walker’s most ardent legislative handmaiden.
Fitzgerald is shameless-and proud of it.
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