“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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The New York Times Editorial: An Incomplete Fix
Thanks to the fiscal cliff deal, the alternative minimum tax will not ensnare tens of millions of middle-class Americans for whom it was never intended. The deal raised the income thresholds before the A.M.T. kicks in and indexes them for inflation going forward. As a practical matter, this means that 28 million filers who would have had to pay the tax on their 2012 returns have been spared and are much less likely to have to pay the tax in the future.
Yet the fixes are incomplete. The purpose of the A.M.T. is to ensure that wealthy taxpayers cannot make excessive use of deductions, shelters and other tax breaks. It was thus supposed to hit multimillionaires and billionaires whose tax shelters reduce their tax bills to a pittance relative to their incomes. In the absence of comprehensive reform, the A.M.T. will continue, for the most part, to allow the highest-end taxpayers to escape, while still afflicting many taxpayers below those lofty levels.
Paul Krugman: Japan Steps Out
For three years economic policy throughout the advanced world has been paralyzed, despite high unemployment, by a dismal orthodoxy. Every suggestion of action to create jobs has been shot down with warnings of dire consequences. If we spend more, the Very Serious People say, the bond markets will punish us. If we print more money, inflation will soar. Nothing should be done because nothing can be done, except ever harsher austerity, which will someday, somehow, be rewarded.
But now it seems that one major nation is breaking ranks – and that nation is, of all places, Japan.
This isn’t the maverick we were looking for. In Japan governments come and governments go, but nothing ever seems to change – indeed, Shinzo Abe, the new prime minister, has had the job before, and his party’s victory was widely seen as the return of the “dinosaurs” who misruled the country for decades. Furthermore, Japan, with its huge government debt and aging population, was supposed to have even less room for maneuver than other advanced countries.
The most significant problem in political discourse is not that people embrace destructive beliefs after issues are rationally debated. It’s that the potency of propaganda, by design, often precludes such debates from taking place. Consider how often one hears the claim that the US is committed to spreading democracy and opposing tyranny in the Middle East in light of this fact from a New York Review of Books article by Hugh Eakin reviewing three new books on Saudi Arabia (via As’ad AbuKhalil):
“The US does more trade – overwhelmingly in oil and weapons – with Saudi Arabia than any other country in the Middle East, including Israel, and depends on close Saudi cooperation in its counterterrorism efforts in Yemen.”
[..]
In other words, the single most repressive regime in that region is also America’s closest ally. Eakin also notes that while Saudi leaders have exploited the rhetoric of the Arab Spring to undermine leaders its dislikes (primarily in Syria and Iran), its only direct action was to send its troops into Bahrain “to stave off a popular revolt and prop up the Bahraini monarchy” and use “its influence in the Gulf Cooperation Council, the alliance of autocratic Persian Gulf states, to pull together support for the beleaguered royal houses of Morocco and Jordan.” About all of this Saudi bolstering of tyranny, Eakin says: “The White House has remained silent.”
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Corporate Gold on the Fiscal Cliff
In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now!, there’s a chapter titled “The Second Gilded Age” in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23.
Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And that’s why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change – their cash brings both political parties to heel. So it is that the policies that got us where we are today – in this big ditch of chronic financial depression – have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.
John Nichols: Why Bernie Sanders Objects to Obama’s Treasury Nominee
Bernie Sanders campaigned, hard, for Barack Obama’s re-election.
But the independent senator from Vermont is not going to rubberstamp the president’s selection of Jack Lew, a supporter of banking deregulation who has passed back and forth through the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington, as the nation’s seventy-sixth secretary of the Treasury. [..]
One of the Senate’s most vital duties is that of providing “advice and consent” on presidential nominations. A president has broad leeway when it comes to naming members of the cabinet-arguably broader leeway than in the naming of lifetime appointees to the federal judiciary. But that leeway is not such that senators can or should simply approve every nominee. Advice should be given, and at times consent should be denied-not just by partisan foes of the sitting president but, sometimes, by allies of that president.
Dana Milbank: Obama’s Cabinet of yes men
President Obama hasn’t even begun his second term, yet already he has been ensnared by scandal.
Republicans have uncovered a shocking level of wrongdoing in the Oval Office, and I’m afraid what they say is true: The president is brazenly trying to fill his Cabinet with . . . people he likes.
Alas, the perfidy doesn’t end there. Not only is Obama naming agreeable people to his Cabinet, he is also – audaciously, flagrantly – nominating people who . . . agree with his policies. [..]
But that’s Obama’s prerogative. He won the election. The only scandal is denying him the right to choose his own advisers.
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