“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: A Responsible Budget
President Obama’s 2013 budget was greeted on Monday with Republican catcalls that it is simply a campaign document, but election-year budgets are supposed to explain priorities to voters. This one offers a clear and welcome contrast to the slashing austerity – and protect-the-wealthy priorities – favored by Republican Congressional leaders and the party’s presidential candidates.
The president’s budget calls for long-term deficit reduction, but its immediate priority is to encourage the fledgling economic recovery. Instead of trying to stabilize the budget on the backs of the poor, it would raise taxes on the wealthy and on big banks and eliminate many corporate tax loopholes. [..]
Republicans, on the other hand, would cut taxes for the rich and cut almost all of that spending, heedless of the pain that it would inflict on the economy and the millions of Americans still reeling from the downturn’s effects. In poll after poll, the public has made clear that it prefers the president’s approach of rebuilding the economy now and tackling the deficit when the fundamentals are stronger. While Republicans have counted on voters blaming Mr. Obama for the hard times, some are beginning to worry that they will be blamed for their obstructionism. That was clear on Monday when House leaders announced that they would agree to Mr. Obama’s proposal to extend the payroll tax cut for the rest of this year without insisting on drastic cuts elsewhere to pay for it.
Samhita Mukhophadyay : This Valentine’s Day, Occupy the Romantic-Industrial Complex
This Valentine’s Day, enthusiasts are expected to spend approximately $17.6 billion on romance-related goods-jewelry, cards, flowers and chocolates-a ten-year high, according to the National Retail Federation. That’s not even the whole picture, when you include all the other things that go along with the “perfect” romantic experience: heart shaped doohickeys, sexy lingerie, bikini waxes, fancy dinners, candle lit romantic massages for two, romantic getaways, puppies and couples counseling. Clearly, the economics of love is serious business.
But despite evidence of how much love costs these days and cultural norms that are evolving away from traditional gender roles in romantic relationships, the commercialization of Valentine’s Day continues to communicate traditional and conventional fantasies about gender and love. It’s what theorists call heteronormativity: the structures and norms that privilege heterosexual monogamy, while simultaneously stigmatizing behavior that deviates from this model. How is it that heteronormativity still has such a stronghold on the public imagination, despite the fact that more and more people are choosing to delay or forgo marriage or despite the fact in more and more states across the country, marriage is no longer limited to people who are straight? How has it still intact after the Kim Kardashian marital disaster saga, or the notorious marital flameouts between Kevin Federline and Britney Spears or Katy Perry and Russell Brand? How has it weathered scandal after scandal in which the most ardent supporters of “marriage between a man and a woman” are unable to stay faithful?
Watching what’s happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting life boat.
We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny — they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others — the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control.
The obstacles facing the millennial generation didn’t just happen. Take an economy skewed to the top, low wages and missing jobs, predatory interest rates on college loans: these are politically engineered consequences of government of, by, and for the one percent. So, too, is our tax code the product of money and politics, influence and favoritism, lobbyists and the laws they draft for rented politicians to enact.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: What Is Really Happening in Athens
he Greek Parlement’s vote, during the night of Sunday to Monday, on the austerity plan the European Union demanded as a prerequisite to the release of a new installment of financial assistance was inevitable. Clearly, the alternative to the austerity plan was, in the short term, exclusion from the eurozone, leading to bankruptcy and the consequent plunge into a state of poverty even more unbearable than what the country faces today. And one finally understands that the negligence of successive governments in Athens for the past 30 years — their demagoguery, their clientelism, their bad faith, and their short-sighted policies — have forced their partners to raise their voices.
Nonetheless.
In an affair like this one, which is political as much as economic, and where the highly inflammable matter being toyed with is a people, their pride, their memory, their revolt, their survival, one would like to have seen things handled more deftly.
Mark Weisbot: President Obama’s Budget is Disappointing
Good but limited measures on tax reform are sacrificed, once again, to Obama’s eagerness to compromise on budget cuts
President Obama’s proposed budget has a few interesting proposals for reforms over the next decade. Among the best are the proposals to rescind the Bush tax cuts for households with incomes of more than $250,000, and to tax dividends for stockholders among this group as ordinary income. These and a few other proposals would sum up to a small but significant step in the opposite direction to where this country has been going for the past three decades: that is, a vast upward redistribution of income to the rich and the super-rich.
But those concerned with the immediate future are likely to be disappointed. Most Americans have to work for a living, but there are more than 25 million, or 15%, of the labor force, who are either unemployed, have given up looking for work, or are involuntarily working part time. The main reason for that is quite simple: there is not enough demand for goods and services in the economy in order to employ them.
With private demand still weak from the collapse of the housing bubble, and state and local governments still tightening their budgets and laying off workers, this leaves the federal government as the spender of last resort. But President Obama’s budget actually reduces spending, adjusted for inflation, for the coming fiscal year (2013). This means that the government will not contribute to resolving the unemployment crisis under this budget.
Ari Berman: Howard Dean Predicts Obama Re-Election, Democrats Retake House
No incumbent president since FDR has been re-elected with an unemployment rate above 8 percent. Despite that daunting precedent, an increasing number of political analysts and prominent Democratic Party figures are now bullish about President Obama’s re-election prospects. “Obama’s chances have definitely improved,” former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean recently told me. “If Mitt Romney’s the Republican nominee, I would say it’s a one or two point win for Obama.”
Dean also likes his party’s chances at the Congressional level. “I’m predicting flat out that if Obama wins, Democrats take back the House,” he says. Other analysts have recently raised that possibility, even though GOP domination of the redistricting process gives Republicans a major edge in 2012.
Richard Dreyfuss: United States and Al Qaeda on Same Side in Syria
t’s worth noting that the United States and Al Qaeda are on the same side in Syria.
That’s not to deny that the government of Syria is conducting a brutal, no-holds-barred attack against a nationwide rebellion that is, increasingly, led by armed paramilitary forces and, well, terrorists.
But the Battle of Syria 2012 pits Saudi Arabia, Turkey, a bloc of Sunni Arab states, the Muslim Brotherhood and even Al Qaeda against Syria and the regime of President Bashar Assad, whose quasi-Shiite minority Alawite sect forms the core of his political power and who is backed by Shiite Iran. It’s no surprise that the United States, which swallowed Saudi Arabia’s ongoing vicious crackdown on the Shiite rebellion in the island Sunni kingdom of Bahrain, is on board with what increasingly looks like a Saudi- and Turkish-backed effort at forcible regime change in Damascus.
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