“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: Oligarchy, American Style
Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!
Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.
So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
New York Times Editorial: Putting Millionaires Before Jobs
There’s nothing partisan about a road or a bridge or an airport; Democrats and Republicans have voted to spend billions on them for decades and long supported rebuilding plans in their own states. On Thursday, though, when President Obama’s plan to spend $60 billion on infrastructure repairs came up for a vote in the Senate, not a single Republican agreed to break the party’s filibuster.
That’s because the bill would pay for itself with a 0.7 percent surtax on people making more than $1 million. That would affect about 345,000 taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, adding an average of $13,457 to their annual tax bills. Protecting that elite group – and hewing to their rigid antitax vows – was more important to Senate Republicans than the thousands of construction jobs the bill would have helped create, or the millions of people who would have used the rebuilt roads, bridges and airports.
The Republican Party’s inevitable decision to nominate Mitt Romney for president is starting to look evitable after all.
That’s certainly not a consensus view among the Washington cognoscenti, who tend to see the yet-to-come primaries and caucuses as mere formalities. Romney, they say, is the GOP’s obvious choice-a poised and experienced candidate with presidential bearing, world-class hair and the ability to speak in complete sentences, even about the economy. Sooner or later, the party will come to its senses and see that he has the best chance of beating President Obama.
The White House certainly seems to buy into this scenario. For months now, virtually every conversation I’ve had with one of those increasingly chatty “senior administration officials,” on any subject, has included at least a swipe or two at Romney. It’s clear that he’s the opponent the Obama machine is gearing up to face.
But I’m less and less convinced. It’s hard for me to see how any of the other candidates can win the nomination-but it’s hard for me to see how Romney wins it, either.
John Nichols: Union Pressure, OWS Protests Tear Down a Barrier to Taxing Speculators
Does protesting and pressuring powerful players in political and economic life matter?
Can the White House and Congress really be moved on questions so central as taxing financial speculation?
Yes.
And here’s the evidence of how of it works.
For months, the AFL-CIO has been been pressuring the Obama administration to ease off rigid opposition to international efforts to tax financial speculators. And that pressure has been highlighted on Capitol Hill and on the streets by an allied union, National Nurses United.
The White House stance has been one of the chief barriers to the efforts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to reach an agreement within the Group of 20 economic superpowers to develop a small financial transactions tax (FTT) that would target speculators.
Patricia J. Williams: Culture of Death: Who Gets to Be a Person in Mississippi?
On November 8, Mississippi is set to vote on Measure 26, a ballot initiative that would redefine the state’s Bill of Rights to extend the protections of personhood to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” It is striking that the measure, which is largely motivated by religious concerns about the sanctity of human existence, crops up in a state that has one of the lowest indices for overall quality of life-whenever it might begin-in the entire country: the infant mortality rate over the last decade is about 10 per 1,000 live births, with black babies dying at twice the rate of white babies. Mississippi leads the country in obesity and ranks forty-sixth in the number of state residents who have health insurance. It suffers from high death rates from cancer and heart disease. Twenty-three percent of the population lives below the poverty level, giving Mississippi the unenviable distinction of ranking dead last in the nation.
With the odds of survival so relatively skewed, it is no wonder that there might be some anxiety over preserving the very idea of life. Then, too, the legal category of “personhood” seems particularly capacious since Citizens United; if such a label protects corporations, banks and homeowners’ associations-and don’t they seem to be thriving!-what blessings might it extend to a zygote, that abstracted conception of future stock, human capital, mortal enterprise?
William Greider: Smearing Social Security
The Washington Post published a sensational story last Sunday that claimed that Social Security is already broke. “Adding billions to US budget woes,” the headline read. Instead of piling up surpluses, as the Social Security trust fund has done for nearly thirty years, this year the system became “cash negative.” Social Security, the Post warned, “is sucking money out of the Treasury.”
This is alarming news, if true. Fortunately, it is not true. The Post committed what I call fact-filled mendacity-a pejorative mash of scary buzz words and opaque statistics that encourages readers to reach false conclusions. The newspaper’s obvious objective is goosing the so-called supercommittee whose Congressional members seem to be reluctant about whacking Social Security benefits. The formerly liberal Washington Post has long urged that as a solution to federal debt and deficits. Its ideological posture influences its reporting and also what “informed observers” think. Last night, I heard a TV anchor remark in passing, “We just read that Social Security is in the red.”
Baloney. The truth-if truth is still relevant to Washington politics-is that Social Security has never contributed a dime to the federal budget deficits. Therefore, cutting Social Security for the elderly will do nothing to relieve the deficit problem. Senate majority leader Harry Reid has made this point, so has President Obama. Not true, the Post story flatly declares.
George Zornick: America’s Top Corporations Pay Half of Taxes They Owe
Particularly in recent months, Republicans have gotten a lot of mileage out of the claim that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay taxes. “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax,” Rick Perry said in his presidential announcement speech. “A majority of American households paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada,” declared Senator John Cornyn of Texas this summer.
The truth behind the truth, of course, is that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes because they don’t earn enough money. For example, a couple with two children earning less than $26,400 isn’t required to pay any income taxes, because they are presumably stretched thin enough already. The elderly, poor and young receive various tax credits that exempt them from having to pay already meager incomes to the federal government.
If Republicans really wanted to go after tax freeloaders, they ought to start talking about big corporations. Today, Citizens for Tax Justice released a damning report detailing how many large corporations paid ridiculously low tax rates on billions in profit-and in some cases, actually got money from the government.
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