“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”.
New York Times Editorial: The Supercommittee Collapses
The smoke from the smoldering failure known as the deficit “supercommittee” spread heavily across Capitol Hill on Monday, allowing Republicans to obscure the simple truth about the failure to reach an agreement. The only reason the committee failed was because Republicans refused to raise taxes on the rich, and, in fact, wanted to cut them even below their current bargain-basement level.
Republicans in Washington claimed Democrats refused to budge on entitlements. John Boehner, the House speaker, and Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential candidate, as if by rote, issued statements saying it was all President Obama’s fault. But, had a single Republican on the panel endorsed even a modest increase in upper-income tax rates, Republicans could have won trillions in cuts from entitlements and discretionary spending. (Certainly far beyond anything we would endorse.)
Eugene Robinson: ‘Super Committee’ Fails to Overcome Republican Dogma
No, the sun didn’t rise in the west this morning. No, Republicans on the congressional “super committee” didn’t offer meaningful concessions on raising new tax revenue. And no, “both sides” are not equally responsible for the failure to compromise.
As usual, the two parties began with vastly different ideas of what it means to negotiate. Democrats envisioned meeting somewhere in the middle, while Republicans anticipated not moving an inch. This isn’t just my spin, it’s a matter of public record: Before the 12-member super committee ever met, House Speaker John Boehner warned that it had better not agree to any new tax revenue.
Think about this for a minute. The whole point of the subcommittee exercise was to begin reducing the ballooning national debt, now more than $15 trillion. Closing such a big gap with spending cuts is possible only in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.
Who gains – and who loses – when public assets and jobs are turned over to the private sector?
The corporate right endlessly promotes “privatization” of public assets and public jobs as a cash-raising or cost-saving measure. Privatization is when the public turns over assets like airports, roads or buildings, or contracts out a public function like trash collection to a private company. Many cities contract out their trash collection. To raise cash Arizona even sold its state capital building and leased it back.
The justification for privatization is the old argument that private companies do everything better and more “efficiently” than government, and will find ways to cut costs. Over and over we hear that companies do everything for less cost than government. But it never seems to sink in that private companies don’t do things unless the people at the top can make a bundle of cash; if the CEO isn’t making millions, that CEO will move the company on to something else. When government does something they don’t have to pay millions to someone at the top.
Wendell Potter: The Health Care Industry’s Stranglehold on Congress
One of the reasons why Congress has been largely unable to make the American health care system more efficient and equitable is because of the stranglehold lobbyists for special interests have on the institution.
Whenever lawmakers consider any kind of meaningful reform, the proposed remedies inevitably create winners and losers. Physicians’ incomes most likely will be affected in some way, as will the profits of all the other major players: the hospitals, the drug companies, the medical device manufacturers, and the insurers, just to name a few. The list is long, and the platoons of highly paid and well-connected lobbyists who represent their interests comprise a large private army that conquered Capitol Hill years ago.
One has to wonder, then, how in the world Congress was able to include a provision in last year’s health care reform law to establish an independent board that would strip Congress of some of the authority it currently has – but rarely is able to exercise – over the Medicare program.
Robert Dreyfuss: Is Egypt Syria?
Egypt, whose revolution in February, was a landmark of the Arab Spring, is looking more and more like, well, Syria.
Nearly two dozen people have been killed and 1,500 wounded in several days of clashes between Egyptian security forces and protesters, not in Tahrir Square but elsewhere in Cairo, along with Alexandria, Suez, and other Egyptian cities.
From Cairo, the Times reports today:
Battles raged throughout the night, with gunfire echoing through streets choked with tear gas and illuminated by scattered fires. Three bodies wrapped in blankets were seen being carried away and witnesses said the bodies were those of protesters hit by live ammunition.
Egypt, meet Syria. It’s staggeringly ironic that the Cairo-based Arab League is taking action to expel and sanction Syria, while right under its nose the Egyptian military is slaughtering demonstrators. (Not to mention the fact that the Arab League is dominated by the ultra-reactionary autocracies in the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who’ve been deeply involved in helping to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi and Syria’s Bashar Assad while propping up the ruling military council in Egypt.)
George Zornick: Supercommittee Was About the Bush Tax Cuts-And That Battle Isn’t Over
At one of the first super-committee meetings, back in September, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf sketched the problem at hand: “Given the aging of the population and rising costs for healthcare, attaining a sustainable Federal budget will require the United States to deviate from the policies of the past 40 years in at least one of the following ways,” he said. “Raise federal revenues significantly above their average share of GDP, make major changes in the sorts of benefits provided for Americans when they become older, or substantially reduce the role of the rest of the Federal Government relative to the size of the economy.”
In short, Elmendorf said the federal government can’t keep doing what it’s doing with revenues so low. So either raise taxes, or get ready for some deep and painful cuts. The likes of Grover Norquist, who has bedeviled the committee, would clearly prefer the latter result-he reaffirmed on 60 Minutes this weekend that he’d be fine with a federal government in 2011 that looks like the federal government of 1911.
Republicans set off on finding some way to both preserve low tax rates and cut as much as they could in order to help pay for it. This whole super-committee charade was never about deficit reduction for Republicans, but protecting low taxes, particularly for the very wealthy-that became abundantly clear when their final offer involved a permanent extension of the budget-busting Bush tax cuts.
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