“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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Jared Bernstein: The Preferences of the Wealthy and Their Role in Our Politics
A critical concern of our time is not simply our high levels of income inequality and their negative impact on opportunity and mobility. It’s how inequality and immobility become entrenched in the system — how they replicate.
In a nation like ours, where the flow of money into politics keeps getting stronger, one way this occurs is through the political preferences of the wealthy. Of course, at any point in our history, the disproportionate policy influence of the wealthy has been a serious problem for our democracy. But in today’s America, two factors intensify this threat: the increased concentration of economic resources, and the increased access those resources have to the political system.
There’s yet another piece to this puzzle, however, kind of a riff off the old F. Scott Fitzgerald line about the rich being different from the rest of us (i.e., besides “they’ve got more money”). What are the political preferences of the wealth and how do they differ from those of the rest of us?
Robert Sheer: 277 Million Boston Bombings
The horror of Boston should be a reminder that the choice of weaponry can be in itself an act of evil. “Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim” is the way the New York Times defined the hideousness of the weapons used, and President Obama made clear that “any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians, it is an act of terror.” But are we as a society prepared to be judged by that standard?
The president’s deployment of drones that all too often treat innocent civilians as collateral damage comes quickly to mind. It should also be pointed out that the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal and, as our killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese demonstrated, those weapons are inherently, by the president’s definition, weapons of terror. But it is America’s role in the deployment of antipersonnel land mines, and our country’s refusal to sign off on a ban on cluster munitions agreed to by most of the world’s nations, that offers the most glaring analogy with the carnage of Boston.
The nation demonstrated again last week how resolute it can be when threatened by murderous terrorists-and how helpless when ordered to heel by smug lobbyists for the gun industry. [..]
Shamefully, however, we have also shown that when alienated young men who are not foreign-born or Muslim do the same, we are powerless.
It is inescapably ironic that while Boston was under siege last week, the Senate was busy rejecting a measure that would have mandated near-universal background checks for gun purchases nationwide-legislation prompted by the massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults last December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Richard (RJ) Eskow: Austerity’s Curveballs
Since the austerity crowd won’t own up to a mistake, I will: I engaged in a kind of thought experiment last week, after we first learned that austerity economics is partly based on a spreadsheet error. I wondered, What if you were a government leader who sincerely believed those figures, or an economist who made the mistake of a lifetime?
My empathy was misplaced. This discovery hasn’t changed government policy one bit — at least not yet. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff seem surprisingly unremorseful. And austerity’s paid pitchmen are still hawking their wares.
It looks like we’re dealing with austerity’s “Curveballs.”
Robert Reich: The Xenophobe Party
The xenophobia has already begun. [..]
Immigration reform is not about national security, in any event. It’s about doing what’s right, and giving the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in America — many of them here for years, working at jobs and paying withholding taxes, and many of them children — a path to citizenship. [..]
The horror of the Boston Marathon is real. But the xenophobic fears it has aroused are not. I would have hoped United States senators felt an obligation to calm public passions than pander to them.
We need immigration reform, and we must protect our civil liberties. These goals are not incompatible with protecting America. Indeed, they are essential to it.
Wendell Potter: [The Higher Health Insurers’ Claim Denial Rate, the Higher the CEO Pay The Higher Health Insurers’ Claim Denial Rate, the Higher the CEO Pay]
When you’re shopping for health insurance, wouldn’t it be great if you could find out every insurer’s claim denial rate? And how much each one spent on lobbying and advertising — and how much they paid their CEO?
You can now find all of that information and more if you live in Vermont, thanks to a law that was enacted last year at the urging of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group.
In compliance with that law, the insurers that do business in Vermont have just disclosed data they’ve been able to keep secret for years. And that information should come in handy when Vermonters begin shopping for coverage at the state’s online health insurance exchange in October.
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