“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”.
Paul Krugman: A Success Story as Big as Texas? Actually, That’s a Myth
Texas has been adding jobs faster than the rest of the nation, a fact that has become especially notable in the past couple of years – I recently saw it referred to as the Texas “jobs juggernaut” – as overall job growth has been so poor.
But what’s the story here? Oddly, it’s rare to see anyone in this debate talking in terms of models – that is, the kind of stylized, simplified, but internally consistent stories (not necessarily mathematical) that are what economic analysis is all about. So let me try to fill that gap by offering three informal models of what might be going on in Texas.
In each of these stories, I imagine, to clarify things, an initial state in which America is divided into two identical regions; call them Texas and New York. Each of these regions has a labor force that lives in houses; I ignore other factors of production, except that I assume that building houses requires land, which is in limited supply. And we assume that initially everything is in equilibrium: wages and the cost of housing are the same in both regions.
Robert Reich: The President’s Bold Jobs Bill (Maybe)
The President is sounding like a fighter these days. He even says he’ll be proposing a jobs bill in September – and if Republicans don’t go along he’ll fight for it through Election Day (or beyond).
That’s a start. But read the small print and all he’s talked about so far is extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits (good, but small potatoes), ratifying the Columbia and South Korea free trade agreements (not necessarily a job-creating move), and creating an infrastructure bank.
An infrastructure bank might be helpful, depending on its size.
Which is the real question hovering over the entire putative jobs bill – its size.
Stocks on Wall Street dropped sharply on Thursday, with investors spooked, again, about the euro-zone debt crisis and the sputtering United States economy.
Stocks on Wall Street dropped sharply on Thursday, with investors spooked, again, about the euro-zone debt crisis and the sputtering United States economy.
Yet, even at this hour, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic seem determined to handcuff fiscal policies – the main tools that can increase jobs, consumer demand and economic growth – with an unquestioning devotion to rigid austerity.
Europe’s post-2008 economic problems have differed from America’s in many important ways. Washington has mercifully never had to cope with the problem of a dollar torn apart by the separate taxing and spending policies of 17 sovereign governments.
Joe Conason: What Obama Should Learn From Wisconsin What Obama Should Learn From Wisconsin
With Wisconsin’s epic state Senate recall battle now over, the results carry a clear message that ought to resonate all the way to Washington-and especially the Obama White House. The essence of politics in America today, for Democrats at least, is to understand and communicate the political nature of the opposition.
Having suffered a bad beating last November, the Wisconsin Democrats and their allies have succeeded in building a strong movement that fights back explicitly against the right-wing policies of Gov. Scott Walker’s Republican Party.
Last week, they won two out of six recall campaigns mounted against GOP state senators, which was widely interpreted as a defeat or at best a draw. But on Tuesday, they won all three recall efforts against Democrats, giving them an overall series victory, and cutting deeply into perceived support for the Walker agenda.
Kristina Kallas and Akila Radhakrishnan: Why is the US Waging War on Women Raped in War?
Mandatory sonograms, forced lectures by doctors, humiliating permission slips from abusive husbands, paternalistic opinions from Supreme Court Justice Kennedy, uneducated and patently stupid soundbites from Tea Partiers. That’s not the worst. In this newest wave of the war on women, let’s not forget the U.S. government’s abortion policies toward women in war.
Rape is systematically being used as a weapon of war in conflicts worldwide. During the Rwandan genocide it is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in 100 days and that approximately 20,000 children were born as a result of rape. Recent reports from Burma indicate that Burmese soldiers have orders to rape women. 387 civilians were raped in Walikale, North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a 4 day period last year. In 2008 alone, the U.N. Population Fund recorded 16,000 cases of rape in DRC, two-thirds of them adolescent girls and other children, in an area where rape is vastly underreported. Imagine what the real numbers are.
Daniel Greenwood: Cutting Out the Social Safety Net Is No Sign of Bravery
In today’s New York Times, Helene Cooper wrote a news analysis advocating that President Obama slash Medicare and Social Security even though it might cost him reelection. The reporter, however, offers no reason to think that reneging on the basic commitment citizens must have to one another would make anything better. In reality, damaging our basic contract might be highly profitable to Wall Street financiers (who hope to charge commissions for managing retirement funds that Social Security now manages for far less), hedge-fund managers (who can profit as easily by betting against the American economy as by betting for it), and insurance companies (which will profit from increasingly bloated medical costs until the cost of care gets so high that no one can afford it). But cutting back on the basic guarantees we offer citizens, like cutting back on the other essential governmental services that make successful economies possible, will only make our jobs crisis worse.
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