“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: Sequester of Fools
As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen. [..]
But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas – ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced represented deep wisdom.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: The Tea Party’s Ghost
The deficit that should concern us most right now has to do with time, not money. Money can be recouped. Time just disappears.
And time is what Washington is wasting now on an utterly artificial crisis driven not by economics but by ideology, partisan interest and an obsession over a word-“sequester”-that means nothing to most Americans.
Here is the most important thing about the battle raging in the capital over $85 billion in automatic spending cuts: Republicans are losing the argument but winning the time war.
The more time we spend on pointless disputes about budget cuts no one is expected to make soon, the less we spend trying to solve the problems that confront us right now-and, God forbid, thinking about the future.
Fix the Debt financier Peter G. Peterson knows a thing or two about debt: he’s an expert at creating it. Peterson founded the private equity firm Blackstone Group in 1985 with Stephen Schwarzman (who compared raising taxes to “when Hitler invaded Poland”). Private equity firms don’t contribute much to the economy; they don’t make cars or milk the cows. Too frequently, they buy firms to loot them. After a leveraged buyout, they can leave companies so loaded up with debt they are forced to immediately slash their workforce or employees’ retirement security. [..]
Now Peterson wants to loot Social Security. For decades he has warned of a “Pearl Harbor scenario” in which spending on Social Security and Medicare causes an epic economic meltdown. Fix the Debt is only his latest project pushing the message that the deficit poses a “catastrophic threat,” and the media have been content to echo his warnings. But people should know better than to be frightened by this chorus of calamity. Peterson is no master of prediction when it comes to economic crises. When an actual threat to the economy-the $8 trillion housing bubble-loomed ominously overhead, Peterson said nothing, even as credit markets froze, subprime lenders filed for bankruptcy and economists like Dean Baker shouted from the rooftops.
Eugene Robinson: No Winners in This Game
The standoff over the package of budget cuts known as “the sequester” is the dumbest, most self-defeating fight between President Obama and Republicans in Congress since … let’s see, since the last dumb, self-defeating fight less than two months ago.
Obama is winning this showdown, but only in a relative sense. The truth is that everybody loses-Republicans a little more, Democrats a little less. And the American people, who have a right to expect adult behavior from their elected officials, will inevitably be the biggest losers of all.
It’s hard to believe, but this is the way the richest and most powerful nation on earth runs its affairs these days, lurching from artificial crisis to artificial crisis amid threats of self-inflicted harm. The enemy, truly, is us.
Joe Conason: Staying Stupid: Why the ‘Hip’ Young Republicans Can’t Change Their Party (or Themselves)
Savvy Republicans know that something is deeply wrong with the GOP – frequently mocked these days by Republicans themselves as “the stupid party” – which has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Some have noticed as well that their congressional majority is so widely despised-its main achievement being historically low public approval ratings-as to be sustainable only by gerrymandering. During the last election cycle, those fearsome Republican super PACs, funded by the overlords of Wall Street and Las Vegas, spent hundreds of millions of dollars-with no discernible impact on an alienated electorate. [..]
But like many troubled people grappling with serious life issues, they aren’t truly ready for change. They want to maintain the status quo while giving lip service to reform-and changing as little as possible beyond the superficial. They would do anything to project a fresher image, more attractive and effective, without confronting their deeper problems.
Peter Hart: Middle-of-the-Road Obama and Presidential Distortion
The message we’ve been hearing from the mainstream media about Obama’s push for a renewed brand of liberalism is flagrantly false.
Here’s a thought: Maybe, just maybe, Barack Obama isn’t a socialist. [..]
But let’s consider reality for a moment. The highest-profile clash raging in Washington is over Obama’s selection of a Republican senator as his Pentagon chief. He’s nominated a Treasury secretary who was making big bucks on Wall Street at the height of the financial meltdown. His nominee to head up the Securities & Exchange Commission spent the past decade as a lawyer defending the banks she’ll now be keeping an eye on.
If Obama is intent on carrying out his secret socialist agenda – or even a muscular liberal one – he has a funny way of showing it.
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