“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: The Shrill and the Serious
Washington policy debates are primarily about being admitted to the club of participants rather than about logic and evidence. Until the public understands this fact, there is little chance that the vast majority of people will have much ability to influence the course of policy.
The budget deficit is the current obsession in Washington. You can get big bucks spinning scare stories of huge budget deficits that will bankrupt the government and sink the economy. However, the indisputable reality is that the large budget deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn following the collapse of the housing bubble.
But the people who make this point are not invited to take part in the discussion. Pointing out this fact makes one shrill; you have to say that the deficit is a huge problem to be a serious person in Washington.
William K. Black: The Republican Campaign to Convince Missouri to Join in a Fiscal Suicide Pact with Kansas
I have written previously to describe Kansas Republicans’ unholy war against moderate conservatives of their own Party. Governor Brownback and Secretary of State Kobach led the successful purge in the primary elections of any Republican official who did not back dramatic changes in taxation and measures against “undocumented workers” or “illegal immigrants.” The Kansas fiscal plan will end most income taxes, adopt highly regressive taxes that will not provide equivalent revenue, and sharply cut social programs such as education. [..]
The Republican Tea Party effort to convince Missouri to join Kansas in a fiscal suicide pact reveals how little the Party has learned from the 2012 elections. The Tea Party’s leverage over the Republican Party continues to wound the Party, the infra-red states, and the nation. The Missouri legislature is predisposed to enter into the suicide pact with Kansas. We will soon see whether it can be convinced by the folks who chose Akin to choose to make Missouri a low-skill, low-pay, and low-service Tea Party paradise. The Missouri Republican Party’s wealthiest donor believes that the best way to convince Republican legislators to sign on to the Kansas fiscal suicide pact is an ad campaign that calls for protecting our tax base and teachers by adopting the Kansas plan that would gut our tax base and require us to fire thousands of teachers. He thinks our legislators are so dumb that his literally childish ad composed of self-contradictions will sweep them up like lemmings. (Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. Only legislators are that stupid.) God help us if Missouri’s legislators take their guidance from Kansas.
If you voted this election, whether for Barack Obama, Jill Stein or even Mitt Romney, you did not vote for austerity. But that’s of little consequence to Obama and the Republicans. The two parties are currently drafting measures that will undermine Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare as the economy approaches the “fiscal cliff” at the end of this year when more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts will kick in absent a new budget deal. [..]
Trusting a Democratic president with protecting the general welfare is ill advised when the last one gave us NAFTA, welfare “reform” and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Not only has Obama been gunning for retirement programs since 2008 (I’ll explain), he’s so hell bent on reducing deficits that he’s willing to damage the economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates (pdf) if the economy plunges over the cliff, recession will hit in 2013. Interestingly, the CBO calculates that if all the tax cuts are left in place and no spending cuts are enacted the economy will grow by 4.4 percent next year and add 2.3 million full-time equivalent jobs. This would be the highest rate of growth since the late 1990s.
Wendell Potter: The Usual Suspects Who Will Benefit From Gutting Obamacare Now Want You to Worry About ‘Disruption’
Disruption.
Get ready to hear that word many times in the coming weeks, especially if you hang out inside the Washington beltway.
“Disruption” will be the new buzzword in an upcoming advertising campaign aimed at scaring us. The campaign is selling the idea that millions of Americans will face higher premiums and possibly be forced into health plans with skimpier benefits — i.e., disrupted — if Congress doesn’t repeal a provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that raises money to pay for expanding coverage for the uninsured.
The greed of the health insurance industry knows no bounds. Insurance companies will get billions of dollars in new revenue every year as a result of the health act’s requirement that, starting in 2014, we will have to buy coverage from private insurers if we’re not eligible for Medicare or Medicaid.
Peter Diamond: Down With Supercommittees
Instead of wide-ranging, politically motivated panels, we need narrowly targeted commissions, without sitting members of Congress, modeled on the successful Base Closure and Realignment Commissions of recent decades.
Compare the successes of five consecutive base-closing commissions, which were charged with shuttering or shrinking military facilities, and the failures of both the Simpson-Bowles Commission and the deficit “supercommittee.”
In all of these cases, Congress recognized the difficulty in addressing an important issue, and committed itself to a no-amendments, up-or-down action on a possible commission report.
Each report from the base-closing commissions resulted in closures. In contrast, the Simpson-Bowles report did not receive enough votes to prompt Congressional action, and the supercommittee did not even finish a report.
John Nichols: Vulture Capitalism Ate Your Twinkies
“Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized,” explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.
“Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven’t had a raise in eight years,” said the AFL-CIO head. “In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 percent pay and benefits cut.”
When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually.
They were challenging Bain-style abuses by a private-equity group – Ripplewood Holdings – that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.
The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace, to crimes of war, to crimes against humanity. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, the British member, presided over the proceedings, which lasted 10 months and consisted of 216 court sessions.
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