“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.
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Robert Kuttner; What Bernanke Couldn’t Quite Say
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used his much-anticipated Friday speech at the Fed’s annual end-of-summer conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to sound almost like the last Keynesian.
As he put it: “Monetary policy cannot achieve by itself what a broader and more balanced set of economic policies might achieve; in particular, it cannot neutralize the fiscal and financial risks that the country faces.”
Commentators made much of the fact that Bernanke said that he considered the economy dangerously soft; that unemployment was far too high for this stage of a recovery; that housing continued to be a major drag, as well as state and local budget cuts.
The New York Times: Mr. Bernanke’s Next Task
It will be another week – at a meeting of the Federal Reserve policy-making committee on Sept. 12 and 13 – before anyone knows for sure what Ben Bernanke thinks the Fed should do, if anything, to stimulate the weak economy. What is known is that, without more help, the economy is likely to remain weak, or grow weaker, through the rest of this year.
In his speech on Friday at the annual meeting on monetary policy in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Mr. Bernanke said that past Fed interventions had been a plus for the economy, raising growth enough to add an estimated two million jobs, but that economic conditions are still “obviously far from satisfactory.” Then he said that more help would be forthcoming “as needed.”
But, by his own analysis, help is needed now.
If politicians and those around them do not pay their fair share of taxes, how can we expect that anyone else will?
Mitt Romney’s income taxes have become a major issue in the American presidential campaign. Is this just petty politics, or does it really matter? In fact, it does matter – and not just for Americans.
A major theme of the underlying political debate in the United States is the role of the state and the need for collective action. The private sector, while central in a modern economy, cannot ensure its success alone. For example, the financial crisis that began in 2008 demonstrated the need for adequate regulation.
Moreover, beyond effective regulation (including ensuring a level playing field for competition), modern economies are founded on technological innovation, which in turn presupposes basic research funded by government. This is an example of a public good – things from which we all benefit, but that would be under-supplied (or not supplied at all) were we to rely on the private sector.
Conservative politicians in the US underestimate the importance of publicly provided education, technology, and infrastructure. Economies in which government provides these public goods perform far better than those in which it does not.
Bob Herbert: How We Can Bring Millions of Americans to the Middle Class
The United States needs to be reimagined. A recent study from the Pew Research Center tells us that in economic terms the middle class “has suffered its worst decade in modern history.” It’s shrinking.
With jobs scarce, wages declining and the nation’s wealth concentrating ever more intensely at the top, the middle class has shrunk in size for the first time since World War II. [..]
What we’re experiencing is nothing less than an historic generational decline in living standards. We’ve obviously been doing something very wrong.
Laura Flanders; Labor Day Message: We Can’t Labor Without Our Lives
“Every culture lives within its dream,” wrote Lewis Mumford in 1934:
“It is reality – while the sleep lasts. But, like the sleeper, a culture lives within an objective world that…sometimes breaks into the dream, like a noise, to modify it or to make further sleep impossible.”
This Labor Day it’s conventional wisdom to say the American dream is broken. For those who ever dreamed it, that dream featured all that typically fills the fantasies of capitalist cultures: if not heaven, then at least happiness here on earth, built from stuff and standing acquired through human sweat and toil; Americans sold themselves (and others) another fancy too, a fair shake, in a “city upon a hill” nation replete with opportunity. (The facts of slavery, land theft and genocide notwithstanding.)
For many who were sleeping soundly previously, the noise that’s broken in is that of millions of Americans living without enough to eat (46 million, including one in five of all children); the racket of rampant ill-health, the half-of-all jobs that barely lift families out of poverty ($34,000 or less) and the kicker: less social mobility than exists in most of Old World Europe.
Joe Nocera: They’re Not What They Used to Be
What did I miss while I was away? Ah, yes, the Republican National Convention. I hear the Republicans nominated Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan for president and vice president. Imagine that. [..]
As usual, journalists vastly outnumbered the delegates. As usual, the thing was so finely scripted, Eastwood aside, that there wasn’t a whole lot of genuine news to report. As Jeremy Peters put it in The Times, “Today’s media labor to enliven coverage of what typically are endless hours of preordained events.” The decision by the major networks to cut back coverage to an hour a night is not irrational. [..]
On the other hand, old-style conventions, for all their flaws, demanded compromise that is essential for governing. Nor were the party bosses willing to throw their weight behind candidates who were too far outside the mainstream.
The primary system has allowed the two parties to be captured by their more extreme elements. Compromise is now a dirty word. Centrism is for losers. Conventions now enforce the views of the hard-liners.
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