“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”.
Robert Reich: How Did Mitt Make So Much Money And Pay So Little in Taxes?
Now that Mitt Romney is the presumed Republican candidate, it’s fair to ask how he made so much money ($21 million in 2010 alone) and paid such a low tax rate (only 14.9 percent).
Not only fair to ask, but instructive to know. Because the magic of private equity reveals a lot about how and why our economic system has become so distorted and lopsided – why all the gains are going to the very top while the rest of us aren’t going anywhere.
The magic of private equity isn’t really magic at all. It’s a magic trick – and it’s played on you and me.
Jake Kornbluth and I have made this 2 minute video that explains it all in eight simple steps. (Thanks to MoveOn.org for staking us.)
By the way, the “other people’s money” that private equity fund managers (as well as other so-called “hedge” fund managers) play with often comes from pension funds that contain the savings of millions of average Americans.
Dave Zirin: A Question of Human Rights: Keeping the F1 Racing Series Out of Bahrain
On April 22, the royal family of Bahrain is determined to stage its annual Formula 1 Grand Prix race. This might not sound like scintillating news, but whether the event goes off as planned is a question with major ramifications for the royal Khalifa family, as well as for the democracy movement in the gulf kingdom. It will also be viewed closely by the US State Department and human rights organizations across the globe. From a renowned prisoner on a two-month hunger strike to a British billionaire fascist sympathizer, the sides have been sharply drawn.
For the Bahraini royals, staging the Formula 1 race is a chance to show the people that normalcy has returned following last year’s massive pro-democracy protests. In 2011, the race was cancelled to the rage of the royals. Now, the royal family is hoping that the sixty people slaughtered by Bahraini and Saudi forces, as well as the thousands arrested and tortured, can be forgotten in the roar of the engines.
For those protesting in the name of expanded political and personal freedoms, the return of the F1 racing series as a slap in the face, given all they’ve suffered in the last year and continue to suffer today. Now the protest movement and human rights organizations are calling upon Bernie Ecclestone, the CEO of Formula 1 Grand Prix, to cancel the race.
Alec MacGillis, a senior editor at The New Republic, has a fantastic piece in the latest edition about how hedge fund managers’ love for President Obama has turned into blind, spitting hatred.
His main argument is that it’s all about feeling disrespected [..]
And now Mr. Obama says what anyone paying attention would: that these big-money people were, to some extent, making their money in socially destructive ways – and so they go insane, precisely because in their hearts they know that he’s right.
And because money talks in politics, this pettiness, this display of ego and hurt vanity, may have disastrous consequences.
Greg Sargent: The case Obama needs to make
Obama’s case for reeection may hinge on whether he can convincingly make the case that his push to combat inequality and tax unfairness isn’t just about basic morality, but also about promoting economic growth and broader prosperity. Republicans are laying the groundwork to paint Obama’s push on taxes as an effort to distract from his failed economic record by diverting public anger about the economy towards the rich. That is to say, they are looking to separate the debate over taxes (where Obama seems to have the upper hand) from the debate over the economy (where they hope to put Obama on the defensive). When Romney argues that government shouldn’t try to address inequality by redistributing wealth, but by freeing up the private sector to promote opportunity and social mobility, he’s also trying to achieve this separation.
Obama’s challenge is to argue that combatting inequality and tax fairness are all about promoting opportunity and mobility – that the two are connected, and that the Republican argument is premised on a false choice between the two. He will argue that addressing those inequities is the only way to ensure that government can continue investing in the country’s economic future and in shoring up the middle class.
David Swanson Liberals Cry Out: Tax the Rich! Fund More Wars!
The shout of the Occupy movement, at least in D.C., has been “End the Wars, Tax the Rich!” in that order and in combination. Over half of federal discretionary spending goes to the war machine. We ought to fix that problem first, and then fix the problem that our overlords aren’t actually paying their fair share of the taxes. My friend Leah Bolger is about to face a possible sentence of months in prison for having taken this message to the Super Committee. Remember them?
But the big, well-funded liberal/progressive groups that are borrowing the language of Occupy and organizing 99% Spring nonviolence trainings are talking about taxing the rich, never mind what the taxes are spent on. I just spoke with someone organizing a bunch of “patriotic millionaires” to come to Washington, D.C., and talk about how they’d like to be taxed more. I suggested that they might also comment on what their money should go to, and I was told that saying more than one simple thing was bad messaging policy.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: How Santorum boxed in Romney
Rick Santorum’s departure from the presidential race could not come soon enough for Mitt Romney. In proving himself more tenacious than anyone predicted, Santorum dramatized one of Romney’s major problems, created another and forced the now-inevitable Republican nominee into a strategic dilemma.
Republicans may condemn class warfare, but their primaries turned into a class struggle. Romney performed best among voters with high incomes, and he was consistently weaker with the white working class, even in the late primaries where he put Santorum away. And Romney cannot win without rolling up very large margins among less well-off whites.
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