Punting the Pundits

“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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Dean Baker: Farewell to Bill

Bill Clinton is clearly the most talented politician of our era. It is difficult to imagine Clinton losing an election to any of the people who have run for office in the last two decades. But his skills as a politician should not prevent us from understanding the track record of his economic policies. In fact, until we get a clear understanding of these policies, it is unlikely that we will be able to restore the economy to a path of sound economic growth. [..]

However, the reality is quite different from the mythology. The reduction in the deficit was supposed to lead to an increase in investment and a fall in the trade deficit. These are the two components of GDP that increase our wealth for the long-term, the former by increasing our productive capacity and the latter by giving us ownership of more foreign assets. [..]

In short, the Clinton-era policies sent the U.S. economy on a seriously wrong path. They created an absurd obsession with budget deficits, a pattern of bubble-driven growth, an incredibly bloated financial sector and an unsustainable trade deficit.

The next time he has occasion to address the country it would be great if President Clinton could explain these facts to the American people. Now that would be a speech worth watching.

New York Times: The Shallow End of the Campaign

If the first weekend of Mitt Romney’s general election campaign is any indication, the country is in for eight weeks of wild, often random answers to some of the most important policy questions. Voters trying to understand the positions of Mr. Romney and Representative Paul Ryan are going to have a harder time than ever.

On issue after issue raised in the first weekend of interviews after the conventions, Romney and Ryan actively tried to obscure their positions, as if a clear understanding of their beliefs about taxes, health care or spending would scare away anyone who was listening. Aware that President Obama’s policies in these areas are quite popular once people learn about them, the Republicans are simply sowing confusion. [..]

Mr. Romney thought the weak economy would give him a pass on specifics. But voters expect answers, and the Republicans are demonstrating only shallowness.

Robert Kuttner: Europe’s Latest Gimmick

The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, sent stock markets soaring on Thursday with his announcement that the ECB was prepared to buy unlimited quantities of government bonds of member nations if necessary to halt the crisis. [..]

But what Draghi gave with one hand, he took away with the other. To qualify for ECB purchases of their bonds, nations like Spain and Italy, whose securities are under speculative attack, must submit to the austerity police. [..]

Europe’s economies are prisoners of Merkel’s austerity demands on one side, and the speculative attacks of the bond market on the other. In principle, the ECB could extend unlimited support to government bonds, and take the profit out of speculation. Draghi’s latest announcement seems to offer just that, but the austerity conditions render it next to useless.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Deficit Rorschach Test: The Presidents, the Editors, and the Truth

Both political parties have “an aversion to telling the truth,” says The Washington Post. The truth? That newspaper’s editors are part of a small but powerful billionaire-funded circle that seems to believe that any facts that don’t support their distorted and unpopular ideas are deviations from the “truth.”

With a few selected phrases, President Obama and former President Clinton appeared to endorse this tiny faction’s recovery-crushing austerity approach last week in Charlotte. But the rest of their speeches, along with others given at the convention, were a strong rejection of the privately authored set of policy proposals known as Simpson-Bowles. That’s good, since Simpson-Bowles so closely resembles the Republican Party Platform that the Democrats could wind up running against themselves.

Voters should embrace the Democrats’ stirring anti-austerity rhetoric. They should also encourage Democratic leaders to embrace their own rhetoric, to stop “triangulating” themselves into invisibility, and speak plainly and directly to the American people. In other words, Democrats should say they oppose any cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. They should say they’ll use government resources to create and protect the jobs we need — for teachers, firefighters, and police officers, among others. And that they’ll face facts and address the real cause of the government’s long-term budget deficit.

Robert Sheer: The Great Deregulator

Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.

Do those convention delegates, and the fawning media that were wowed by the former president’s rhetorical seductions, not recall that just before he left office Clinton signed off on the game-changing legislation that ended the sensible rules imposed on Wall Street during the Great Depression? It was Clinton who cooperated with the Republicans in reversing the legacy of FDR’s New Deal, opening the floodgates of unfettered avarice that almost drowned the world’s economy during the reign of George W. Bush.