“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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Paul Krugman: Looking for Mister Goodpain
Three years ago, a terrible thing happened to economic policy, both here and in Europe. Although the worst of the financial crisis was over, economies on both sides of the Atlantic remained deeply depressed, with very high unemployment. Yet the Western world’s policy elite somehow decided en masse that unemployment was no longer a crucial concern, and that reducing budget deficits should be the overriding priority.
In recent columns, I’ve argued that worries about the deficit are, in fact, greatly exaggerated – and have documented the increasingly desperate efforts of the deficit scolds to keep fear alive. Today, however, I’d like to talk about a different but related kind of desperation: the frantic effort to find some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded. For the advocates of fiscal austerity – the austerians – made promises as well as threats: austerity, they claimed, would both avert crisis and lead to prosperity.
And let nobody accuse the austerians of lacking a sense of romance; in fact, they’ve spent years looking for Mr. Goodpain.
Robert Creamer: The Verdict Is In: GOP Austerity Proposals Are Toxic for Our Economy
There are two major pillars of Republican economic ideology.
First is “trickle down” economics — the notion that if we allow the wealthiest two percent to accumulate more and more of the fruits of our economy, the benefits will “trickle down” to everyone else.
The second is fiscal austerity — the idea that the best response to an economic downturn is to “tighten our belts” and slash critical government spending that we “no longer can afford.”
Both of these pillars were created to justify the transfer of more and more income to the wealthy few and to provide a rationale for keeping their taxes as low as possible. But even recognizing the GOP’s motivation in proposing them, ordinary voters might be tempted to support them if they actually produced economic growth and good-paying jobs for everyday Americans. They don’t. And anyone who tries to make a case to the contrary must ignore the last century of economic history.
The UK’s looming triple-dip recession should be austerity’s death knell, but in the fevered brains of Washington analysts it lives on
The news that the UK, with negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, faces the prospect of a triple-dip recession, should be the final blow to intellectual credibility of deficit hawks. You just can’t get more wrong than this flat-earth bunch of economic policy-makers.
By all rights, these folks should be laughed out of town. They should be retrained for a job more suited to their skill set – preferably, something that doesn’t involve numbers, or people.
But that’s not what is happening. The people who got it all wrong are still calling the shots in the UK, the IMF, the European Central Bank, and Washington. The idea that job security would have any relationship to performance is completely alien in the world of economic policy. With few exceptions, these people enjoy a level of job security that would make even the most powerful unions green with envy.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: A Creepy Student Essay Contest Reflects Wall Street’s War For Young Minds
It may be the creepiest student competition in history. Foreclosure.Com’s essay contest may be trivial compared to what Wall Street’s doing to undermine our educational system and manipulate our thinking, but it reflects the same warped set of values. [..]
The real contest isn’t an essay question. It’s a struggle over our values and ethics, over the ways we think and the lenses through which we view our world. Since Dr. King gave his Syracuse speech we’ve become vastly more unequal in income. Higher education has become unaffordable for millions of young people. Prosperity is shrinking, not expanding.
Dr. King spoke to his Syracuse audience of “the day when the fears of insecurity, the doubts clouding the future, will be transformed to radiant confidence, into glowing excitement to reach creative goals, and into an abiding moral balance … undergirded by a secure and expanding prosperity for all.”
Nick Turse: The Hagel Hearings: Murder in Vietnam
The last best chance for the truth about a lost war and America’s war-making future
He’s been battered by big-money conservative groups looking to derail his bid for secretary of defense. Critics say he wants to end America’s nuclear program. They claim he’s anti-Israel and soft on Iran. So you can expect intense questioning — if only for theatrical effect — about all of the above (and undoubtedly then some) as Chuck Hagel faces his Senate confirmation hearings today.
You can be sure of one other thing: Hagel’s military service in Vietnam will be mentioned — and praised. It’s likely, however, to be in a separate and distinct category, unrelated to the pointed questions about current issues like defense priorities, his beliefs on the use of force abroad, or the Defense Department’s role in counterterrorism operations. You can also be sure of this: no senator will ask Chuck Hagel about his presence during the machine-gunning of an orphanage in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta or the lessons he might have drawn from that incident.
Ray McGovern: When Truth Tried to Stop War
Ten years ago, Katharine Gun, then a 28-year-old British intelligence officer, saw an e-mailed memo from the U.S. National Security Agency that confirmed for her in black and white the already widespread suspicion that the U.S. and U.K. were about to launch war against Iraq on false pretenses.
Doing what she could to head off what she considered, correctly, an illegal war of aggression, she printed a copy of the memo and arranged for a friend to give it to the London Observer. “I have always ever followed my conscience,” she said, explaining what drove her to take such a large risk. [..]
But Katharine Gun could smell a rat, as well as the sulfur of war, and she would not put her career and comfort ahead of the slaughter and devastation that war inevitably brings to innocent people. In that, she distinguished herself, just as many others in positions of authority disgraced themselves.
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