“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 Board: The President and the Hunger Strike
As of Tuesday morning, Charlie Savage reported in The Times, 100 of the 166 inmates at Guantánamo are participating in a hunger strike against their conditions and indefinite detention. Twenty-one have been “approved” for force-feeding, which involves the insertion of a tube through their nostrils and down their throats.
Mr. Obama defended the practice. “I don’t want these individuals to die,” he said.
Most people don’t. But a recently published bipartisan report on detainee treatment by the Constitution Project said “forced feeding of detainees is a form of abuse and must end.” The World Medical Association has long considered forced feeding a violation of a physicians’ ethics when it is done against a competent person’s express wishes, a point that was reinforced on April 25 by Dr. Jeremy Lazarus, president of the American Medical Association, in a letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
Dean Baker: Logic Deficit: Why Were Reinhart-Rogoff Ever Taken Seriously?
The controversy continues to simmer around the Reinhart-Rogoff (RR) paper and the now famous Excel spreadsheet error that led to claim that debt-to-GDP ratios above 90 percent led to sharply lower growth rates. The University of Massachusetts paper that exposed this mistake has led many people to reconsider their earlier acceptance of the Reinhart-Rogoff 90 percent debt cliff.
While that is a positive development, the re-examination should go a step deeper and ask why anyone ever took their argument seriously in the first place. It’s not just the arithmetic on debt-to-GDP ratios that tripped up RR; it was the basic logic of their argument.
Sure, we urgently need to repeal the sequester. (You can tell your Representative that here.) But it’s even more important to repeal the insane thinking that led to the sequester.
That means repealing the deficit babble that still dominates Washington (and provided the theme for the President’s weekly Saturday address). It means repealing a conservative Republicanism which is based, not on economic philosophy, but on an atavistic hatred for government in any form.
Most of all, it means repealing the politics of deprivation and replacing them with the politics of growth. We’ve learned that contractionary policy based on government cuts is … well, contractionary. And that expansion policy is needed if we want the economy to expand.
The argument shouldn’t be about where we should be cutting, but about where we should be spending more money.
William K. Black: The Lethal Lemons on the Road to Bangladesh
I wrote yesterday about the “control frauds” (in which the person controlling a seemingly legitimate entity uses it as a “weapon” to defraud) that target purchasers of bad quality goods (“lemons”) and employees. The example I used to explain these concepts was the collapse of the building housing garment factories in Bangladesh.
As I write, there are terrible reports indicating that the death toll is far greater than currently reported. Again, the initial reports from a disaster often prove inaccurate in important ways so I urge caution and the need to confirm whether the newer reports are accurate.
The higher death toll is not what prompts this article. I write to discuss the intersection of control fraud, austerity, globalization, labor “reform,” and economic development.
Jared Berbstein: The Trouble With Low Inflation
The Fed announced today that they’ll continue to be the only ones in town trying to do something about the stubbornly high unemployment rate:
The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that its stimulus campaign would press forward at the same pace it has maintained since December, putting to rest for now any suggestion that it was leaning toward doing less.
[..]
The Fed’s “…statement also noted that the pace of inflation had slackened, a potential sign of economic weakness, but it showed little concern about that trend.”
Me, I’m pretty concerned about that trend. On the one hand, lower price growth means higher real wages, all else equal, and that’s important as slower nominal wage growth is another problem right now.
Robert Reich: The Fed, Apple and Trickle-Down Economics
The Fed’s policy of keeping interest rates near zero is another form of trickle-down economics.
For evidence, look no further than Apple’s decision to borrow a whopping $17 billion and turn it over to its investors in the form of dividends and stock buy-backs.
Apple is already sitting on $145 billion. But with interest rates so low, it’s cheaper to borrow. This also lets Apple avoid U.S. taxes on its cash horde socked away overseas where taxes are lower.
Other big companies are doing much the same on a smaller scale.
Who gains from all this? The richest 10 percent of Americans who own 90 percent of all shares of stock.
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