“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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Robert Kuttner: The Grand Bargain We Don’t Need
President Obama has been meeting with small groups of Republican senators and representatives in an effort to reduce the damage of the so-called sequester — the $85 billion in automatic budget cuts that took effect March 1. But these meetings, if successful, are likely to lead to greater economic and political damage, in the form of a “grand bargain” to cut Social Security and Medicare in exchange for some reductions in tax preferences.
This is a bad idea for several reasons.
First, in these deals, it’s usually Democrats who get taken to the cleaners. Republican leaders insist that their rank and file members will never vote for progressive tax increases, so the tax part of the bargain tends to focus on closing minor loopholes while Republicans demand major spending cuts in return.
Secondly, the sequester is a grave problem not just because the cuts are automatic, but because they are a down payment on a decade of budget cuts that both President Obama and the Republicans have embraced. If we trade the $85 billion of automatic cuts in the sequester for $85 billion of some other cuts, the impact on the economy is just as depressive.
Josh Barrow: Don’t Cut Social Security, Expand It
With everyone in Washington experiencing sea-bass-induced euphoria, we’re talking again about a “grand bargain” to replace the sequestration and shrink the federal budget deficit. And that means we’re talking about using the chained consumer-price index, a lower and more accurate inflation measure, to modestly raise taxes and cut Social Security benefits over time.
Back in December, I wrote that applying chained CPI to Social Security is the wrong solution to our budget problems: It’s just a way of dressing up a cut to retirement benefits at a time when retirement insecurity is rising. Despite its problems, Social Security is the best-functioning component of the U.S.’s retirement-saving system. Instead of cutting, the federal government should be expanding its role in retirement saving.
Somebody really needs to let Elizabeth Warren know how Washingon society works. Last week Warren and several other senators rebuked regulators for their refusal to act against felonious banks and bankers when they violate sanctions or criminally assist psychotic drug lords who cut off people’s heads.
Their outrage was triggered by the lack of indictments against bankers at HSBC. The bank’s executives earned big bonuses after their bank laundered money for Mexican drug cartels and criminally violated sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. As “punishment,” the banks’ shareholders will pay a $1.9 billion fine. The lawbreakers themselves will not be charged, and will be allowed to keep their own ill-gotten income.
Eugene Robinson: Paul Ryan’s make-believe budget
If Rep. Paul Ryan wants people to take his budget manifestos seriously, he should be honest about his ambition: not so much to make the federal government fiscally sustainable as to make it smaller.
You will recall that the Ryan Budget was a big Republican selling point in last year’s election. Most famously, Ryan proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program. He offered the usual GOP recipe of tax cuts – to be offset by closing certain loopholes, which he would not specify – along with drastic reductions in non-defense “discretionary” spending. [..]
Now Ryan, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, is coming back with an ostensibly new and improved version of the framework that voters rejected in November. Judging by the preview he offered Sunday, the new plan is even less grounded in reality than was the old one.
Robert L. Borosage: Mary Jo White: Wall Street Watch Dog or Lap Dog? The CEO Pay Test
On Tuesday, March 12, the Senate Banking Committee will begin review of the nomination of Mary Jo White to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Committee. The Committee should probe deeply on whether she will be a watchdog or a lap dog for Wall Street. One clear test is her position on the rules for publishing CEO compensation and CEO to worker pay ratios which the SEC has been sitting on for the nearly three years since the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation.
White is touted as a former tough prosecutor with the ability to police Wall Street. She is at the top of her profession, with extraordinary experience both as a prosecutor and as a leading corporate defense attorney in a white shoe Wall Street defense firm. And it is this very experience that raises questions as to whether she can and will do the job.
Paul Buchheit: Five Poisons of Privatization
It gets more maddening every day. Essential human needs are being packaged into products to be bought and sold. The right to food and water, education, health care, public spaces, and unrestricted speech shouldn’t be based on who can pay the most, or on who can generate profits with the slickest marketing pitch.
he free-market capitalism that drives our economy is a doctrine of individuals pursuing profit. Nothing else matters. An executive for Roche, a healthcare company, said “We are not in the business to save lives, but to make money.”
With privatization of the common good we risk losing both our heritage and our humanness.
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